cavalcade

Sonic Transformed was probably one of my favourite kart racers of all time, and I played a lot of it on the Vita and PC. I also didn't mind Team Sonic racing, even though it had less SP content than Transformed and perhaps leant a little too heavily on the team aspect. Still good.

I know MPH picked this up, but I had been waiting for ages to see it at a decent price and eventually managed to grab a key on the cheap. Crossworld's gimmick is a little like the branching paths at the end of each Outrun stage. You race a track and then whoever is in the lead gets to pick where to go next - either a random track or a specific one (depending on the type of portal you go through). The racing is similar to Transformed - you can be a kart, boat or plane. Each has its own boost mechanic. There are pickups, and the races are a mix of finding decent lines and well timed item use to fuck over your opponents.

The good, first of all, is that it all looks lovey. I got the full version with all the DLC and there's thousands of characters, tracks and trinkets. The track design is good - though at this stage we've seen every possible inspiration for a kart track in these sorts of games, so there is an element of sameyness to it. The AI is quite tough, but there is a rival mechanic, where you're pitted up against one particular kart in the field you're trying to beat. This works surprisingly well, giving you a focus for the abilities, and also putting up quite a fight even at the lower difficulty levels. There are times it looks very pretty, and there's absolute chaos going off on the tracks, and it does feel very peak kart racer.

The bad…. I don't know. Something feels a little off about it to me. The powerups are totally bizarre. The language Nintendo developed in Mario Kart makes sense. It has a lot of historic heft and weight behind it. Everyone knows what a red shell does. Here the items are…. weird. Big magnets, a sort of saw blade thing, a boxing glove projectile… etc. It all feels a bit like they're trying to find a design space Nintendo hasn't already taken, and not very well. I'm also not entirely sure on the handling and boost mechanics. It feels good on the track, drifting to fill up a meter, but the boat and plane parts feel a little forced. And I'm still trying to find a kart that feels as good as the karts do in, say MK8 or the original Transformed. I'm also not convinced on the flipping over jumps for boost - as I don't think it's possible to fail. So you just spam as many as you can before it plops you on the track. Unless I'm playing on some assisted difficulty mode…. (I should check this).

But yeah. it's good. Is it massively better than the last couple? No.

I meant Gar's post. But, I guess it could apply to Alastor.

Well, that took a bleak turn.

I played some Forza 6 - am I going mad or is nobody really calling them out for basically having released the same game 6 times? Not in a "ho ho, that Gears game is a bit like the last one" way, but genuinely the same fucking game. Same structure, UI, look, feel etc. Just a balooning of install size to 150Gb. It's still chock full of English wankers (even though you're supposedly in Japan) and even Japan isn't that interesting. Tokyo by day feels more like Maidstone. The streets are deserted, so it really is like a post-apocalyptic Kent. The cars drive OK, but there's no boost button, so what's the point? So dull. Jeez.

Back to CrossWorlds it is….

Yes, do we really need a dedicated thread for this handheld? But you know what, I couldn't really find a thread to jam this in, so here we are. I appreciate only feltmonkey will read this.

I have an original ROG Ally. I love it dearly, and it's probably my main gaming platform. One downside is that the battery life is measured in seconds away from a wall plug, and its only got a 512Gb drive, which means juggling titles on and off it all the time. I have also never really liked it being white (OK Farage) as I prefer the screen to blend into the chassis of a machine. I'd been eyeing a ROG Xbox Ally X, but I think the new 20th anniversary Ally suggests a general OLED version is coming soon (the 20th Anniversary edition comes bundled with AR glasses and has a transparent case, and may well be more than £2000 quid all in, so I'm hoping there is a cheaper SKU). I had thought about doing the battery mod, and replacing the NVME drive in my original Ally, but it was all a bit of a hassle. And indeed, since the RAMpocalypse, 2TB drives are ruinous.

Then on rllmuk I saw an original Claw being sold. This was the MSI, Intel Ally contender that was an absolute shitshow at launch. Terrible drivers, terrible performance, more expensive. But for (what the guy wanted) 230 quid, you get pretty much an Ally with a 1TB NVME in. After some research, which showed a lot of the launch issues had been solved (maybe), I decided, ridiculously, that it would be more efficient to buy the second machine and have a sort of 1.5TB duel gaming set up across two machines, rather than spunking £800 on one that did it all. Yeah, I know.

Anyway, so far, not that you really care, my Claw impressions are…. pretty good! The form factor is similar to the Ally. Maybe a touch thicker, though there's not a lot in it. I'm not joking when I say it feels about twice as heavy. The Ally got some shit for needing strong wrists, but holy crap, this is built like a tank. I'm not sure if that's good yet (probably not). The thumbsticks are OK - they're hall effect, but a little higher than the ROG which I'm not sure I like. Buttons and triggers feel similar. The buttons light up! One area the Claw is better is the speakers, which are miles better than the Ally's. The rest of the hardware is similar - near identical 7 inch VRR 120hz screen, for example. Interestingly I think the screen looks a little better on the Claw, but I suspect that's because it sits in a black chassis.

In terms of software, I really like the Ally's UI for launching games. The MSI one is a bit worse. But both have a strong "you're gaming on Windows" vibe. As for game performance, there's not a lot in it so far. I think the Z1 Extreme is better at low wattage, but it's pretty fractional and not even sort of thing Digital Foundry would wank themselves stupid over. Generally the Core 7 chip in the MSI Claw is probably a lot better for office productivity, but isn't really the best choice for gaming (the extra grunt isn't going to make any difference over the Core 5 variant, and probably, if anything makes performance slightly worse).

I haven't noticed any horrendous performance issues, and the battery life seems slightly better than the Ally (52 watt/hr battery vs40 watt/hr, but the Z1 Extreme is a more power efficient chip) and yeah. It's a portable PC. I think if you saw one going super cheap it would certainly do a job. For £230 it's absolutely bonkers (even though there are about 3 subsequent Claws that have come out since). That's like a bag of chips in the UK in 2026.

This concludes a review you didn't need for a bit of hardware you'll never buy.