Enjoy your racing games? Enjoy making tracks for your racing games? Enjoy Online gameplay with other 80 other people?

Trackmania Nations Forever is the game for you. I have played this fast paced racing game for over a year now and I am still not bored of it, this free game has a good balance of gameplay. Trackmania also gives you the choice to buy an upgrade known as Trackmania United Forever if the game takes your liking..

There are 2 parts of the game as i mentioned before, the racing and the track making.

The Racing

Upon registering your account you have the option to tell them your country and area, this allows you to have an official rank within the game. You can work on your rank by doing the premade tracks offline where you have certain times to beat.. On the other side of things there is the online play where clans/independent people create servers with their maps for you to play and compete with other players on the server. When i first got the game my main concern was with having so many players on one server you would have to avoid crashing into other players, i was wrong they use a ghost type system where you can see the players while acing but you can go through them, this in my opinion was the best way to do it.

The controls are very simple, all you need are your arrow keys and maybe 1,2,3 to change views. The car you use in Nations is a fine tuned F1 car it is the most responsive car in the United cars.

Track Making

My favorite part of the game is making tracks, Trackmania comes with a huge variety of track pieces which you can place anywhere on the stadium map. From ramps to boosts the dynamic track builder simply works, there is a way of connecting each type of track piece together. Among the track parts there are also scenery to add to your maps to make it more appealing or make it a part of a track, anything is possible.

Summary

Trackmania will provide you hours of fun for months on end not only competing with others but with yourself, i seriously recommend you try it out. As for purchasing Trackmania United Forever i think that decision is based on your needs of the game as there are plenty of thing on the free verison to do. I myself bought it and don’t really use most of the features apart from the 3D car skins.

Trackmania Homepage / Trackmania video

Jets N’ Guns is a fast-paced 2-D action side-scrolling shoot ‘em-up released in 2004 for the PC by RakeInGrass Software. It was later released for the MC OS X in ‘06.

The game play in Jets N’ Guns is, well, pretty much the same as any other game in the genre but still insanely fun. It has all the best things a shooter could possibly have, awesome music that really gets you into the action, great weapons and upgrades Your ship has space for bombs, missile’s, and three guns on the front and one on the back.

In-between each level you are given the option to buy new weapons or upgrade your previous weapons and equipment, the upgrades can increase the power of the weapon or they can increase the rate of fire or even the velocity, depending of course on the weapon. But you have to be careful when using the more powerful weapons because they can overheat rather quickly if you just hold down the fire button, which is a problem when you have to wait for it to cool down… cause it leaves you out in the open for anything to get you, although once you upgrade your cooling system it is much more tolerable.

The amount of enemies on each stage is truly astounding. There is always something to shoot at or drop bombs on. It gets specially gory when you start blasting away the little men around, who are either shooting at you from a platform in space, falling out of storage containers or, in some levels, flying around on rocket packs blasting away at you with lasers. It feels really good to shut them up with a nice big bomb.

To give you the gist of the storyline you start out in the game as a freelancer, hired to get rid of some space Bandit’s. Afterwards you get in contact with your old C.O. Colonel Troubleman (Yes, all of the names in this game are horribly cheesy) on the USS Impotence, who asks you to rescue the scientist Prof. Von Hamburger from the evil dictator Xoxx. From there on you begin to assault Xoxx’s forces over and over again.

The Graphics are nothing big. They’re what you would expect for a game like this, sometimes they become blocky and pixilated, but they do have their moments of being beautiful and crisp. From my experience the game had no lag or slowdowns from the large explosions or when there were a hundred little things going on onscreen which makes the game very impressive.

The control setup is pretty basic and nothing too amazing, basically use the arrow keys or the mouse to move around while cramming the space bar down to shoot. Again, nothing original but it is a tried and true control scheme, very responsive and its done very well.

The music, now here is where the good part starts. The soundtrack of this game was produced by Machinae Supremacy, a Swedish metal band. This is honestly one of the best fitting soundtracks to a 2-D shooter in my opinion and while sometimes the music is drowned out by whatever is going about on screen it is well worth the times when you can just bang your head to the games in the quiet parts of levels. The style of music is of course metal, fast and hard metal. Very well done and honestly the best aspect of this game.

Last but not least, the lastability of this game isn’t the best, Once you play through it and beat it you are able to start from the beginning of the game with all of your previously acquired goodies and money. The point of this is to collect four weapons to use in an ultimate combination. Unfortunately after you have acquired all of them then it is just the same thing over and over again.

If you want to try this game out for yourselves then the link for the demo is below!