Twisted Metal Black was one of my favorite games of the PS2 era. I am sure this will be a disappointment but I will gladly be disappointed just to get a chance to be Sweet Tooth one more time.

Between Red Faction and Black had many sleepless nights playing vs split screen in college.

Pre-order to unlock Axel!
http://bitmob.com/articles/video-blips-qube-twisted-metal-i-am-alive-and...
wooh! Such a great musical callback! I hope some tracks from the old ones make it in.
I'm glad to see the characters having interesting back stories again.
Sub-bosses baby! (clearly the Brothers Grimm are)

We got the Clowns, the Dolls, and the Grimms.
If they have just three more factions and leader characters and really focus on making them awesome, I'd be really really happy.
Although the importance of having factions is muted by the fact you can pick any vehicle you want.
There has been zero talk of such a thing, but I'd like faction bonuses since the set of available vehicles are the same.
Still, if we assume each main character is the leader of a faction, I'd be happy with three more.
One of them has to be police.
I really hope one of them is a hot racer like Twister.
So who's left? I haven't seen any sports cars, Crimson and Spectre were mostly the same, except Spectre was better as he had a more useful weapon and more armor and Crimson's greater speed didn't make a difference.
Taxis? Roadkill? Rk characters were always generic but I liked his middle of the road stats.
Crusher/Bulldozer/Construction Worker?
Axel could be a leader character, but then why would they have him as a pre-order bonus?
Unlocking characters by performing actions in the game is a big part of the series, but not people with stories generally.
The General/Warthog? Gang of soldiers, certainly happens in real life anyway, they'd probably have much better accuracy.

Something interesting I've noticed, the destruction physics are very very very old-school.
It still kinda looks like the old days when if a developer really wanted something to blow up in-game,
they had to animate it. It's nice to see them harken back to that, but really, I wonder if people will like it.

2 and Black were my bread and butter. 2, especially (hated 3 and 4)... I can still hear the sound effects and the score in my head.

Minion approaches!

"Last year's boss rises from the lava. "I must win! Calypso and I have a score to settle!" he yells, as he comes after you with a vengeance! "

Talk about a complete and total lack of interest across almost the entire internet about this game. I didn't even know there was a demo coming out. QT3 just created a thread for the game on their forums. This is kinda crazy to me.

I tried the demo last night. The mechanics felt very solid to me, and I'm in the mood for this sort of thing right now. But the AI is super cheap (it's supposed to be a free for all, but they home in on you nearly exclusively), which I do not care for at all. I need the MP demo to sell me on it, but it isn't working right now.

Care to articulate your issues Captain?

Re: SP: the single player says "Challenge" for a reason. Jaffe has said this is not what the normal ai is like. Obviously they should have articulated this in the demo, alas. Of course, if you played tm back on psx, then you know they always hone in on you anyway.

Why do you need the online MP though? I'd gladly pay $60 for this even without the online MP. I did for all the others.
I love the stories of the characters. I liked Dollface's story in Black and from the trailer, this one's even better.

Re: MP: Twisted Metal is chaos incarnate. It's about a tournament of destruction between groups of cars equipped with missiles taking place in your safe, manicured lawn, suburban hometown. It is the teardown of everything stable and bland and the blowing up of everyone who can't live without a pretense of safety and the culmination of all destructive tendencies and desires that are normally suppressed.

In summation, yes, it is a little hectic sometimes, I agree.

I like playing team- and objective-based online games and avoid death match usually, but tm is deathmatch in my mind. I find I do better in dm than nuke. Normally it's so easy to be focused on a goal with a team & objective, but tm is so distracting. Also, even knowing where the pickups are, I'm always lacking weapons. I have to remember to use freeze more. Although what's weird is that sometimes it seems more effective than other times when I'm hit. You know those satellite dishes? You can reach them, you have to boost up the hill at the right place and then there's a huge area in the hills, at least in nuke.

Weapons Training

I'm going to be picking this up mostly on nostalgia, but when I have been able to not get disconnected, I've had fun with the demo. Although, it's a lot more complicated than I remember the PS One games being. We do have more buttons and motion now, though. I hope it'll captivate me enough at launch because February is one extremely busy gaming month.

So...how is it?

Yeah, that went a long way to convincing me that, Yes, I actually would like a new Twisted Metal, thank you.

I would love to know if the multiplayer matchmaking is as broken for you guys as it was for Giant Bomb. I'm reading plenty of other reports of that too. I should have a sealed copy waiting for me when I get home but I'm not going to open it yet and if the multiplayer is that broken, I'll be returning it and renting it. I was looking forward to this a lot but $60 plus an online pass means they have no excuse for it shipping in that condition. If it turns out they've managed to fix it on the back end, I'll keep it. If not and they fix it later, I'll buy it then. I may miss the free copy of Twisted Metal Black that comes with it but I'll never play that anyway.

Okay, so I've played the demo and only the demo, but much of what I felt while playing said demo is explored by Tom Chick: http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2012/02/16/will-sony-strangle-potential...

I'm been playing some this past week, so while I haven't gone very far with the content overall, I will say for the most part it's more Twisted Metal. That might mean more to me than others because my only game in the series is 4, which is one of my favorite childhood games. Games you can play with the ones you love definitely top most of my memories, except maybe really exceptional games or ones you can really click with.

Anyway, I'd say my only disappointment is still the sadly trimmed SP, although you can easily make the case that the length of MP can make up for it in terms of time. It's not just that they cut the stories and content down, it's that they lack a kind of kinetic energy and the races in particular are f*cking terrible. I have the last race ahead of me, so rah, rah. A handful+ of all different challenges hardly feels like a tournament for the player, or to make the story feel significant. I'll say I've had fun with most of the SP, but even without the knowledge of previous titles, it's hard not to complain.

I think I'm Rank 3 in MP, a ~dozen matches played. I've played all types, but don't feel the need to get analytical with them. The types of play are just the rules, the real backbone of TM are the cars and how they play against each other. Jaffe regularly calls it a fighting game, and for the most part I agree. He did design it, anyway. It doesn't feel like MW, but a bit like UT. The thing most similar between the three would be the kinetic (there it is again) nature.

Sony managed some background fixes last weekend, and now I can connect to the lobby games 80% of the time, 50% I can connect to the first time I select. You can get an error but still try again and get in. Jaffe thought a patch might be ready for Tuesday or Wednesday, but Sony decided late Wed or Thurs, and it turns out the later. The major issues in the patch that Jaffe's said are fixed are the networking error, and now the host gets an obvious message that there are enough players to start the game. I've been in many game lobbies where the host was AFK or just didn't start the game. Auto-start after a time is preferable, and Jaffe said they'll work on it next if that's what players want.

I'm digging Twisted Metal MP, and I'm also into Tribes Ascend atm. I don't see putting down either soon.