Screens for America's Army, NASCAR and Puck Off

Shaggy September 25, 2007 0

Well the games have been out for a few weeks now but we haven’t seen any screengrabs of America’s Army nor of EA NASCAR from GlobalVR until now. They finally updated their website which includes information about another game that I don’t recall hearing anything about called Puck Off, a shuffleboard game that is being sold as a conversion kit.

Since I have not yet had a chance to play any of these games I cannot comment on how they play (which I think is most important) so for now all we can do is comment on how they look. These days it’s especially bad to judge a game solely by screenshots (or even YouTube videos) as the quality of the games seems to be downgraded when in still form. NASCAR looks great in the static shots and I can’t wait to see this game in motion. The Deluxe motion cabinet also looks amazing, sporting a huge 57″ HD screen and of course the motion base. I am glad to see that the other two cabinets, while sporting smaller screens, also have HD support. The site also reveals that the PC-based hardware is using an nVidia 7600 based graphics card and a 6 speaker audio system. Let’s just hope that it has the features to set it apart form all the other racers out there. We will see.

America’s Army looks rather bland. I noticed that the marquee had an Unreal logo on it indicating that the game would use the Unreal engine, but it must be an older Unreal engine as it looks similar to a Wii title from these screenshots. I’ll withhold final judgement until I actually see the game in action but this is not one game that will blow your socks off with the low poly environments and jagged edges. It looks like it might have some good lighting effects with soft shadows but again, it’s impossible to really tell until you see it in action. Of course a game that is based on shooting ranges probably doesn’t need graphics that will blow you away. It does feature leaderboards however (although it does not say if they are online) so at least it promotes the old values of arcade competitions.

Puck Off is a surprise as I don’t recall hearing about this one before. As I mentioned previously, it is a conversion kit so that makes it a good alternative for street operators looking for something new. It looks like this game was made to compete with some of IT’s latest games like Target Toss Bags. It is actually video shuffleboard, which could do well on the bar scene. Once again this game doesn’t look terribly impressive despite have some decent hardware to run it (Dual-Core CPU and 1 GB of RAM), the primary part which looks bad are the character models. If they are going to look like that you may as well just digitize some actors and use 2D sprites. Anyways, with a game like shuffleboard I don’t think you really need something that looks uber-photorealistic so it’s OK. I would like to try it out as it looks like fun and it even features internet connectivity so you can play against others online, which is a nice bonus in a game like this. Overall any fan of shuffleboard will probably enjoy this game, given all of the features it has.