by Sophie on May 26, 2010
Eden senior producer Nour Polloni couldn’t be happier with the long awaited “Test Drive Unlimited 2”, the new racing game that the company has been working on for quite a few years now but he insists was well worth the wait.
In an interview with computerandvideogames.com, Polloni says that the new game is more ambitious than ever. “We were already innovative in the first game in the sense that we did an online racing game, kicking off the MMOR kind of genre,” Polloni notes. “We wanted to push that even further – more online, more social, a new island, a more persistent world… more of the MMOR aspect. Also, we really wanted to work on the car experience. That was our vision for the game. We also wanted to listen to feedback from the community and make sure we got that into the game.”
Polloni says it’s a “delicate balance” when it comes to listening to the fans while making the game. “There are technical constraints,” he admits. “Constraints linked to the car manufacturers and also it might not be in the vision of the game and where we want to take it. For example if they only want rally games, that’s a whole different type of genre so we won’t go radically to only rally types of games. In terms of feedback, a lot of the stuff we got back was asking for a day and night cycle, weather etc… There were some things that were quite easy to adapt following player feedback.”
Gaming is like taking cocaine, according to an “expert” talking to the Lancashire Evening Post. In the hysterical article, “counselor” and “therapist” Steve Pope (presumably said qualifications were gained from the inside of a cereal packet) claims that gaming is “the fastest growing addiction in the country” and leads to “physical problems such as obesity”, as well as making the yawningly predictable claim that “Computer game addiction can also spiral into violence as after playing violent games, they may turn their fantasy games into reality”.
The hilarious inanity of such claims needs no explanation to gamers, but the big question is why supposedly sensible newspapers insist on running such nonsense stories from such ludicrous self-appointed “experts”. Mr. Pope even has the bare faced audacity to make this clearly insane claim – “Spending two hours on a game station is equivalent to taking a line of cocaine in the high it produces.” Marvel at the sheer lunacy of this statement, and worry that vulnerable people may actually be placing their mental health in the hands of someone who would make it.
Needless to say, hilarity was the general response from users on computerandvideogames.com too. “These so called experts are nothing but idiots,” wrote user alan666, a far more balanced and sensible comment than anything Mr. Pope had to say. “Stupidest report ever” noted stu_the_great, while Richy23 responded with “Thanks for (this) useless and ridiculous report full of garbage and probably hysteria.” The tabloid media’s appetite for demonizing gaming – no matter how staggeringly lunatic their claims – continues unabated.
