Play This Game: Trials HD
Trials HD is a new XBox arcade game in which you ride a motorcycle through various obstacle courses and try to finish as quick as possible, with as few faults (retries) as possible, and/or perhaps even just try to finish the course. I mention the last one because this game is hard, REALLY hard.
It’s really rare for me to like games that are extremely difficult as most of the time for me gaming should be fun and relaxing and to say that Trials HD is challenging would be an understatement. You get 500 faults (or tries from a checkpoint and checkpoints are not spread that far apart) and a maximum of 30 minutes to get through a level (where a flawless time might be something along the lines of 1 minute) and you do hit those limits on some levels. But I guess what makes that palatable is that the difficulty ramps up quite gradually. Tracks are sorted into beginner, easy, medium, hard, and extreme. And for extra challenge there are medals for each track (where gold is a quick flawless run) so that adds more levels of difficulty and more replayabilty. It doesn’t really get extremely difficult until hard but medium will start giving you a bit of a challenge on some levels.
The good thing is leaderboard replays. If you’re having trouble with a certain track, you can go to the leaderboard replay of that level and it not only shows someone doing it but also graphically shows the button presses and analog stick movements that the person is doing. The only thing I wish is that you’d be able to jump into the replays while in the level (you can only watch them while not playing a level), then you could come up to a hard obstacle that kicks your ass and immediately go into the replay and see how it’s done. But that might ruin a bit of the challenge.
Just going through the tracks is not the only thing to do in the game. There’s also tournaments which are groups of levels that must be done together without being able to restart from the beginning; getting good medals in these is extremely challenging because usually to get gold in a track it’s on about my hundredth restart of that level but to get gold in a tournament I’d have to do it first time through. Another section of the game is the skill games which are like mingames; there are skill games in which you have to crash and break as many bones as possible, or ride doing a wheelie as far as possible. Finally, there’s a track creator. I’ve not tried this out much so I won’t talk about it and I’ve also not played any custom tracks because it seems as if you can only share tracks among your friends which I wish wasn’t the case.
Trials HD is epitome of a simple to pick up, difficult to master game and this is due to the controls. The main controls are only really gas, brake and lean. But the other buttons you’ll be using quite a bit due to the game’s difficulty are the buttons to bailout, restart at beginning of level and go back to last checkpoint.
I’ve been playing this game quite a bit over the past few days and while I doubt I’ll ever finish it, I still feel it was completely worth it. Trials HD is available on the XBox arcade marketplace. If you don’t have an XBox there are also a couple PC games if you want to check it out.
