I can see how restricting it to one lap could make the game more immediately accessible: people who dismissed the original as "too short" often did so because they missed the fact that you had the option of extending your time on each level by flying over the Ideya Palace rather than into it.Mmhmm. It's one of the things we were concerned about from the beginning. It seems doing 'laps' is out of the question now.
I think they'll base the score on how quickly you can do a level WHILE getting those high links in. I guess it's just a different way to challenge old fans without reusing the old method of laps. I still loved doing laps though.
But this lack of laps does seem to be a simplification that will affect the game's long-term appeal. If there's a limited number of items in each "mare" (not sure what the equivalent will be called in JoD), and each level is shorter than the 120 seconds you were given in the original game, and you lose the tension of deciding whether to finish now or risk another lap... well, that reduces the number of elements and variables involved. So it's possible that the "perfect score" will be much easier to obtain than in the original.
Oh well. As long as the core elements of the gameplay are fun, and as long as the game saves records at all, there will definitely be some fun to be had from whatever high score features are in the game.
But I'm still hoping there's a dedicated score attack mode to unlock.
Depends on what you want out of a game I suppose. Games like GoldenEye, Crazy Taxi and the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series are fun, but I wouldn't have played them anywhere near as much as I did if they hadn't tracked best times or scores.Okay, I want to know why everyone's so obsessed with the score attack stuff. It doesn't seem that great to me...
For me, the quality of the first playthrough of a game's "story" mode is sometimes less relevant than whether I can return to it to try and beat my own records. (Hence why I like the two Sonic Adventure games... for the last few years, I've only returned to them to time/score attack the Sonic/Shadow levels, so thoughts of the shooting/hunting stages have been banished from my mind.)