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Rage: Testy update

by J Nash (December 19th, 2010 at 11:07 pm)

Treacherously abandoning their solemn pledge that, as a throwaway promo, Rage would never be updated, Id have in fact updated Rage.

We’ve no idea why (but it’d be terrifically funny if the game’s made so much cash that their new besuited paymasters have crashed into and knocked over a row of telephone cabinets racing to demand more on the iThing) but as we’ve downloaded and actually played the update rather than just reading the blurb we can now PROBABLY EXCLUSIVELY reveal what happens in a longer news item than is at all warranted but we still can’t make that idea of a Weekend Update update round-up work in any way that’s funny and all the other recent updates for games we possess have been amazingly boring and/or involved Santa hats.

Rage is now Game Centre-compatible.

This means a bunch of leaderboards and idiot achievements (“Shoot fifty million monsters while receiving exactly 17 wounds, on Bunker Medium, on Tuesday — 2 points,” that sort of thing) but I was tremendously impressed by the way the cumulative awards provide a small percentage indicator so you know how long you have to repeat some woolly task to win an imaginary epaulette. I don’t know if this is an Id or Apple idea, but everyone else should rip it off immediately.

(As an aside, I’ve just updated my iThing to 4.2 via many hours of exhilarating tedium because Apple are cretins — essentially, it is impossible to upgrade my Mac to the level inexplicably demanded before the hideous iTunes Shop will deign to run the iThing installer, so I had to commandeer a PC and start from scratch, but at least gaolbreaking’s still straightforward once you find a secret file — so can now see all this G Centre-y stuff, which appears to be Openfeint at gunpoint.)

Rage now has a mirror mode.

This took me embarrassingly long to work out — click Play then keep scrolling through the level select until you reach Asylum II or whatever (ie, the “II” bit means it’s the mirror version). And it’s q disappointing, really: the levels are only flipped horizontally, so a beastie who scuttles out from the right now scuttles out from the left and so on.

Strictly this is newly challenging, but I was expecting the maps to run properly backwards, which can’t in any way be more difficult to code (obviously I mean the encounter fight bits themselves would be unreversed — you wouldn’t start with monsters up your nose who then hunchedly beetle away toe to heel and vanish into plaster cracks or leap 20 feet out of the ceiling). Maybe the idea was dropped because it’d spoil the carefully established atmosphere — at a couple of points you scriptedly fall off ledges, etc, which in my real reverse-o mode would mean you were unexpectedly sucked up a wall. Except!

You can tell this is the mirror mode because the blokes are usually on the opposite sides. (Also, the graffiti’s flipped but I didn’t take a pic of that because I am an idiot.)

Rage now has a museum mode.

This is all the maps minus the beasties and items and you scroll through the scripted path by nudging the Run button. The idea is that you can freely inspect and coo at all the special graphics, which of course you won’t because the whole game’s in that wildly tedious post-apocalypse industrial style again, but it’s a novel bonus and because you’re completely in charge of the speed you can pause in mid-air during those ledge tumbles for undemanding chortles. (You’re also freed from the frustrating body scripting, ie can twist right around at any point, so can fume all over again at the way the game itself locks off your pelvis at critical moments.)

Rage now has a gyro mode.

I don’t have a gyro iThing so can’t test this, but swinging your gyro iThing around and looking “through” it to control the game as if you’re playing one of those “augmented reality” things where shoddy ghosts are overlaid on your garden sounds intriguing enough that I can easily imagine you’ll play it as much as twice.

A neato update then and one mercifully free of Christmas. You can read our Podgamer Recommendation review of the original version, or if you’re now tempted to buy the game, it’s 59p/€0,79/99¢ for the iThing version and £1.19/€1,59/$1.99 for Rage HD.

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