..but let's not forget the puzzle section
The last section, and one that had me puzzling over for a long time is the aptly named puzzle section, that essentially throws the ma editor at you and then sets you a challenge. This is an excellent way to bring an oft overlooked part of any game to the fore and get gamers actually using it.
Other than IL2, I can’t honestly say that I’ve ever spent so much time with a map editor just mucking about, but Sunrise actually incorporates it into the game, and it does it so smoothly and so well that you’ll wonder why no-one has thought of it before.
At the start of each puzzle you’re presented with either a set of checkpoints to get through or an obstacle to overcome and then you’re given a limited number of tiles to place on the map to let you do this. It may be that the overall challenge is to get enough speed to jump a gap, you may have to try and leap a building or just fit the pieces together so you can drive a course but all of these will have a time limit you have to try and beat. Sometimes, it may well be that the most obvious solution is not necessarily the fastest one and a little jiggery pokery is needed to shave vitals tenths of a second off your lap time to win the coveted gold medal.
It’s at this point I’d like to thank Nadeo for one of the most annoyingly frustrating afternoons of my life as I tried again and again to take half a second of my time off a puzzle to find that moving one tile to a different spot meant I got a two separate boosts instead of one long one… and came in a full 1.5 seconds quicker on my first go, winning me a gold medal. Cheers guys, I’m damn near bald now and I didn’t have that much spare to start with.
Of course, what this section does is introduce you to the map editor which you can access at any time you like to create your own courses which you can then share with others to spread your own warped vision of what a race track should be like. And if that wasn’t enough, you can save the replays of every race in every section and even splice them together to make your own movie… it would seem Nadeo have thought of everything.
