2y ago

Hot Take: Twisted Metal III

I've been revisiting some classic Playstation 1 games, and many of them hold up.

I didn't have access to the larger gamer community when I first played these games, so it's been fun to re-discover them through the eyes of the gamer community.

I've learned secrets, strategies and stories about how these games are developed.

I've also learned - apparently many of you hated Twisted Metal III.

While I don't argue against Twisted Metal II as the high water mark, here's my hot take: Twisted Metal III was a perfectly serviceable sequel and provided more fun for those of us who overplayed II so much that we even beat the game as Grasshopper and Roadkill.

So I'm curious - is it just vocal minority or most of you who felt let down by Twisted Metal III?

4 comments

I only owned Twisted Metal III and Twisted Metal (2012). So to me, TM3 WAS Twisted Metal and I loved it.
- The good news for you is that TW3 was, as you know, pretty fantastic.

One thing that definitely contributed to this: when these games were coming out, those of us who were reading the gaming magazines at the time were aware that Sony had taken the IP away from the original devs, Singletrac, between 2 and 3. So we went in skeptical, and then… the controls were squishy, the power ups all looked the same (replaced the 2D icons with 3D pickups in an age where that just did not work), the weapons didn’t pack as much visceral ppunch… it just didn’t feel right. And knowing that this was an entirely different dev team, “not feeling right” felt like a betrayal. So while 3 probably isn’t a massive downgrade from 2 in an objective sense, that feeling of betrayal turned mild disappointment into HAAAAATE.
And then Rogue Trip came out, which was the new car combat game from Singletrac, and there was a collective “oh, this is what TM3 was supposed to feel like.” And that didn’t help matters.

Played a bunch of twisted metal. Driver and Die Hard Trilogy were also great car action games.
No cars, but we had the first one or 2 levels of Loaded on a demo disc, and I always wanted more.