Vidjama Gmaes Work

It isn’t fun.

The most frustrating thing about bad games is that there are always a crew of people who will rush to its defense to talk about how you’re wrong for not liking bad design. It’s how I came up with Titov’s Law, named after Sergey Titov who is one of the most incompetent developers of all time. Titov is known for Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, one of the worst games of all time if not a strong contender for the worst game of all time. But I found one.

I found at least one genuine idiot who thinks Big Rigs is actually a really fun game and unironically so. There’s always one in every group.

Hot Wheels Unleashed 2 could be a great game except for two problems; the controls suck and the physics suck. Oh and the community is ridiculously toxic for a game centered around children’s toys like Hot Wheels.

The controls in the first Hot Wheels Unleashed were bad. They didn’t fix any of that for the second game. I guess my biggest problem is that the handling of cars is insanely inconsistent even on the same maps. One moment you’ll be knocking out drifts and gripping the map pretty tight and the next you’ll try to do a drift at half speed and your car will skid all the way across the map before being able to make a simple 45 degree turn. Or you’ll plant directly into a wall and go from first to last place.

And that’s not even talking about the complete dog crap physics system where your car will occasionally just be jettisoned into the air like it’s a…toy. Is it true to life? I have no idea. But it’s not fun as a game system and it’s less the product of a competent group and more the rush job of a developer that shits out four to five annualized racing games every single year and doesn’t particularly care about any individual release.

The big problem with Hot Wheels Unleashed is that 3 is probably going to come out in 2025 and I expect it to be worse than 2. Because Hot Wheels Unleashed sold a crap ton of copies, over two million by the press releases. And that’s great, but it very clearly left a bad taste in people’s mouths because most of those customers didn’t come back. Unleashed peaked at 2,579 players on Steam concurrently. Unleashed 2 peaked at 308, something like an 85% drop in user interest from the first to the second. Milestone later came out and admitted that it sold below expectations.

Milestone blamed the poor results on the crowded release window, so we know they aren’t too keen on accepting responsibility for their failures. Also unlike Unleashed, Milestone refused to release any sales figures for Unleashed 2 which you should assume means it is worse than you think. The positive side is that Hot Wheels Unleashed 3 won’t cost much to develop since Milestone recycles the same games over and over again after the first release only with degraded features, like EA does with its sports titles.

Oh well, what’s on TV?