This is by no means a proper postmortem of the "car combat" genre, but a recent viewer e-mail on The Jeff Gerstmann Show got me thinking about Twisted Metal and and the near total abandonment of the type of gameplay it innovated. To hear Gerstmann explain it, the advent of more sophisticated control schemes and adoption of first person shooters on console contributed to an erosion of interest in car combat. He points to the need to gas and brake to simulate the fluidity of movement FPS games required as being a problem later solved by analog controls, though some single-analog games still employ a similar control style, like KISS Psycho Circus, a classic! I see the logic here. Twisted Metal was the only franchise with legs, and the rapid pace of change game design was undergoing in the mid-to-late 90s meant a lot of genres phased in and out of existence.

I decided to put together a committee to further investigate the demise of the genre, comprised of my friends Larry Davis, TransWitchSammy, and Appreciations. When asked what they thought of Twisted Metal and what contributed to the withering of the genre, the most interesting answer came from Appreciations, who posited that games like Grand Theft Auto III incorporated some staples of car combat into larger and more ambitious experiences, which further lessened the need for more bespoke vehicle-based brawling. Satisfied, I pressed two of the big red buttons on my console and dropped Larry and Sammy into a subterranean furnace located beneath the conference room. Congratulations on your promotion, Appreciations...

This is a long walk to say I don't really know what the hell happened, because car combat was a genre that I never really cared for. Not because I have some long-standing beef dating back to the 90s, but because it just never interested me. It's always existed in the periphery. I played maybe 15 minutes of the original Twisted Metal on a classmate's PS1 which he brought to school, and it's funny to think back to that when Pokemon in all shapes and form was explicitly banned from campus. Beyond that, it's been a couple minutes here and there while testing ISO sets and demo discs over the year.

Two full hours with Twisted Metal Black is the most I've ever spent with one of these games in a single sitting, and I don't think I like it very much. True to the clip I linked, movement was my most immediate problem. Driving around feels fine, but getting your shots to line up is finicky, resulting in an over-reliance on homing missiles that often whiff against uneven terrain, which while satisfying to get air off of aren't conducive to getting a bead on your opponents. I frequently found myself the recipient of off-screen barrages that chewed through my health before I could flip a U-turn, and usually the attacking car would whizz by before I could line myself up to retaliate. Annoying.

After being assured by Larry that Black is just a hard game, I bumped the difficulty down and played a couple more levels only to find they still took an agonizing amount of time to clear and that I wasn't having much fun. Maye this is one of the worst Twisted Metal games, a series low point (it has a 3.5 average on here, so I'm guessing that's not the case), but I don't rightfully know because I've never given any of these much attention. I don't even know why I picked Black other than vague memories of it being billed at the time as a more mature Twisted Metal experience, one that had a bit of a harder edge. I like the cover, too.

I'm sure someone will tell me to play Vigilante 8 or I will "go in the contraption again," but guess what? I outfitted my 2003 Toyota Avalon with sidewinder missiles, and if you think I'm going back in there you got another thing co-- wait, the trigger isn't engaging oh NO