ModNation Racers: Bring on the Vita

I didn't play ModNation Racers enough. When it first came out, it had everything I could have wanted in a kart racer: fun driving, customizable karts, and a ton of creation tools for building my own tracks. But after a day of discouragement racing a vicious rival in story mode, I walked away. I had the intention of coming back, but I never did.

ModNation Racers: Road Trip feels like a second chance. The easy, rewarding driving returns, along with all the creation modes from the original. These old favorites come packed with a few exciting new features that only the Vita can provide. After playing Road Trip at Sony's San Diego Studios, I have even more incentive to return.

From the starting line, ModNation Racers: Road Trip feels right. The Vita's analog stick handles turning controls much better than the PSP nub ever could, and the game itself runs smoothly. Although the Vita has fewer shoulder triggers than a DualShock controller, the front and back touch screen provide more than enough supplemental control to keep you driving.

Of course the heart of Road Trip beats inside the creation tools, which benefit from additional touch screen support. When you want to tweak your kart you can slide your fingers across the screen and pull all the pieces off your ride in real time to get a look under the hood. Radial dials, which spin along the sides of the HUD, make menu navigation a breeze and avoid display clutter. Hopefully other developers learn from San Diego Studios and play with the possibilities touch screens provide traditional gaming systems.

Road Trip harnesses the Vita's GPS capabilities to unlock special content for traveling players. If you find yourself near special locations around the world, you can boot up Road Trip and unlock special creation content -- like famous landmarks -- to use at your leisure. The team at San Diego explained that if enough players unlock one particular piece of content (something from Rome, perhaps) that piece of content unlocks for the rest of the ModNation community.

ModNation Racers: Road Trip also tracks your total distance traveled in the real world which then contributes to the total travel of the community. This feature might not exhilarate on the same level as a neck and neck race, but it should give some interesting data on how much ModNation Racers fans get around.



With so many racing games advertising 20 to 50 tracks to race on, the team at San Diego proudly boasts that, thanks to the ModNation community, Road Trip will feature 500,000 tracks upon release, from the pre-existing user content. While difficult to gauge the quality of all those tracks, the variety certainly helps the package.

ModNation Racers: Road Trip represents just one of the many exciting games coming to the PlayStation Vita. It makes me regret my decision to walk away from the original but fortunately I won't have to carry that regret with me for too much longer.

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This article is based on a 30 minute demonstration of an incomplete version of ModNation Racers: Road Trip, conducted by Sony San Diego representatives. A few minutes of this session entailed hands-on experience, with the rest of the meeting serving as Q&A.;

Ryan Clements writes for IGN's PlayStation Team. You can follow him on myIGN and Twitter.

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