Toybox Turbos

Who remembers Micro Machines? Those tiny cars furiously driving around a pool table, trying to take each other out of the game with anything at hand, be it a giant hammer, a pool ball or even an opposing car as a blocker.

Toybox Turbos is the spiritual successor to Micro Machines by which I mean pretty much the same game. Both are developed and published by Codemasters and both follow a similar theme; Top down racing around unconventional tracks like breakfast tables, pool tables, science rooms etc. Toybox Turbos is one of those games that is always good to have, its great for parties or groups of friends and even playing solo as its quick, easy, colourful and above all, fun.Veteran racing game players wont have an advantage here, the specifications of  the car are non existent but that doesn't mean tactics aren't rewarded; Taking a car on the inside will give you the lead but also let your opponents sit in your slip stream to gain some speed on you, and when weapons are involved all bets are off. The weapons you have access to Toybox Turbos offer different effects but they all mainly slow you opponents down; The hammer allows you to smash another car to smithereens but limits you to a handful of uses before it disappears. The magnet is a great way of getting back into the race if you've dropped behind, it locks onto a car in whichever direction you're facing and rapidly draws you nearer to it, my personal favourite way of using the magnet is just before you're about to go over a jump as you get to lock onto a car in front of you and launch yourself off into the distance. The machine gun is what it sounds like. Its a rapid fire gun that last for a short period of time,  but it does lock onto whoever is in front of you and, if hit enough, will blow them up. The EMP is probably the least effective weapon as it only hits cars in your general vicinity, as opposed to something like the machine guy, but for a few seconds it does slow down the effected cars and send them veering left and right. The land mines are fun. You can pick these up mid race or, if the race has gone on too long, they will spawn on the track randomly. Land mines cause the car that hit it to flip into the air, losing speed and maybe not even landing the right way up,  I  had a lot of fun trying to do some sweet flips whenever I hit one just to make it look like I meant to drive into it.

There are also pitfall built into the tracks. Land mines aside, on some tracks you will come across fire, maybe from a Bunsen burner or a gas hob, and this will give your car a boost in speed which could win you a point, but could just as easily blow you up if you hit anything, including other cars. The car you hit however is now in the same situation you were just in, so it could end up as a chain reaction of cars being lit on fire and blowing each other up.
The cars are all cosmetic so there isn't really a case of the fastest car or the most resilient to damage, but some of them have fun horns like the Ice cream truck or the Milk float. Others, like the Mini or the Double Decker bus, have normal horns but there is humor value in watching a Mini, an Ice cream truck, a Digger and a Double Decker bus line up to battle it out.

The objective is to get to ten points which is done by getting ahead of the pack, at which point the bottom of the screen will start eating the last place car. Each time this happens, first place gets two points, second place gets one point, third place loses one point and last place loses two points.

All in all I think Toybox Turbos is a fantastic game and will always result in laughs, especially when alcohol is involved.

Thanks for reading and keep checking back to Game Changers fore more gaming news and updates.

DOOM

 

As ingrained into gaming culture as the original Doom is; with it setting the trend for modern shooters yet itself remaining a simplistic, fun and fast experience, it's almost a video game faux pas to have missed out on playing it. With that said, I recently picked up Doom on the Xbox Marketplace and decided to play through to see  just how much it has influenced shooters of today.

What hits your eyes right off the bat, even before you've gotten past the menu screen are the graphics. It's expected that they would be blocky and unappealing by today's standards because the only thing that has held up from 1993 is yours truly. Those "unappealing" graphics, however overshadowed by later advancements they became, have a certain charm to them: maybe its to do with the basic level of art design and the fact that everything looked the same, resulting in a lot of aimless running around trying to find the right key for whatever door you just ran past, but that was part of the challenge right?

Getting away from the graphics that look like the inside of an Atari, one of the other defining features of Doom is the inability to aim. Sounds like a bad thing but it aids the simplicity; no fiddly COD-like reflexes needed, just point in the general direction of the enemy and shoot. Speaking of shooting, the plethora of weapons you can acquire will, I'm sure, keep the attention of most players. As you go from pinging away at a demon with your pistol to giving a zombie man both barrels of your shotgun, carving your way through hoards of enemies wielding a chainsaw to finally redecorate the hallways with their blood by using the BFG, there is plenty to keep any shooter enthusiast happy.

While you're running around causing all this mayhem, you will need to find coloured keys to progress through the levels, it's not all massacring and games you know. Not all of the doors further the game though, some are secrets containing weapons, armour, or just a load more enemies for you to kill. It's not just obvious doors either, there are loads of secrets hidden behind what look like plain walls or raised platforms that can opened or descended by pressing a button or as part of the level progression. All of this results in nothing but fuel for completionists so they can get that sweet 100% a the end of a level.

On with the story and...there isn't one really. Well that's not fair but no one would blame you for missing it. Most of the story is given to you in the instruction manual of the physical game (which I don't have) however a quick trip to Wikipedia solves that, and the rest is given to you in between episodes in the form of overly-long text screens.

In short, you're a space marine working with the UAC, a military orginisation that's secretly experimenting with teleportation between the moons of Mars; Phobos and Deimos.
You are posted to Mars as part of the UAC security team but, as it always does, something goes horribly wrong with the experiment. Deimos disappears while demons, hell-spawn and other unknown evils are let loose on Phobos. You and you're team are tasked with defending Phobos but you soon find yourself alone as the rest of your team foolishly run in and get dealt with sharpish. It's a pretty standard plot but like I said before it doesn't really play much in the actual game, it's more just background to flesh out this 2.39MB fast paced shooting gallery.

Shooters have obviously changed since the time of Doom's breakneck, blood spattered, 90's sci-fi-horror shooter model, but every now and again you can see glimpses of the old guard in some of today's modern shooters. From the array of weapons; be it war time models or pew pew laser guns, to intense swarms of enemies and dodging bullets with the reaction time of a paranoid gnat, or just having a contrived and unnecessary plot. If you look closely enough, all the new boys owe at least something to the original FPS master, DOOM.

On the whole, DOOM has played a big part in the evolution of shooters throughout the years and, even if it might not look it, modern shooters like Call of Duty, Battlefield and Halo all have DOOM to thank for having the chance to grace our consoles and PC's and providing the inspiration for what has become a much more refined genre in gaming.

Keep checking back to Game Changers for more news and updates.