The game is presented in this bright, kid-friendly way, but much of the content - the characters and the tracks - will appeal mostly to those of us who remember the originals. Who is the game for?
Its a really fine market to go for. So when I was making PGR, the market was easy to identify, its a hardcore sim. I know my audience, its men, young men up until mid-30s, who like cars. Its car porn. Its being cool in a car.
This is different because were trying to do this dual audience because we want to capture the kids, but we also want to capture these hardcore SEGA fans who probably the geekiest of geeks. So you get this weird dichotomy of design, which is fine, its ok. What weve really worked hard on is, this is a game that weve built for ourselves, weve not made it for children. You can play it as a child because you can pop it on Easy, but All-Star difficulty is f**king hard. Ive tuned it like a Platinum medal in PGR. Even I cant do it very well, it takes me about seven or eight goes to get it right.
So theres a broad range of difficulties for different types of gamers. the C Class is for casual gamers who dont play very much, B Class is for most people, A Class is pushing on to become a little bit harder and All-Star Class is f**king hard. Really, really, really hard.
I'm always disappointed when people write off kids games. Super Mario World was a kids game, yknow? But that wasnt easy and it wasn't crap.
It wasnt, and what Ive learned from making this, which is the first proper kids game that Ive made, is that accessible doesnt mean easy. It doesnt mean that. It was something that I tripped up on myself. I came to this project from a hardcore sim and I thought I would have to dumb the handling down and stuff...
But half-way through I realised that I was wrong. So you can drift in this game, its not like PGR you dont spin out or anything like that - but if you drift well you get a boost and if you chain the stunts together you do the barrel rolls. This is a good time attack game. And the moment I knew it was a good time attack game, I knew we were onto something.
