Games to Have a Recession to: Apex
In 2003, Atari released a curious little racing/car company simulation game exclusively onto the Xbox. At the time, most people couldn’t have cared less about it—the concept simply wasn’t very interesting during those days.
But 2009 is a different era, with car companies across the world imploding and classic American brands like Pontiac disappearing into the ether. Suddenly, Apex is a lot more interesting.
Apex is pretty faulty as a racing game: the physics are unintuitive, the AI is unbelievable, and the rewards are delivered in a frustrating, nonsensical way (take a shot every time you smash the track record while still not winning the race). Apex can get a bit of a buy on these problems, however, because it doesn’t treat racing like any other game out there.
It’s pretty easy to discern the intention of most racing games. Some, like Gran Turismo and Forza, are passionate romances with cars themselves, while Midnight Club and Need for Speed delight in the culture of competition. Others, like Burnout, thrill to the experience and danger of just going real fast. Apex has a different purpose, however—it’s a love letter to the car industry, and to the spirit of ingenuity and optimism that drove it in its early days.
Apex is structured pretty simply. It starts with two guys, a converted factory, and a few scrounged concept car blueprints. As a player, you can dictate future R&D designs and make simple modifications to existing vehicles, but your primary role is one of marketer/driver: you race your company’s car in exhibitions, and the better you do the higher your sales go. Structurally, it’s a subtle difference from most racing games. Ideologically, it’s fascinatingly different. This is a driving game where you’re not driving for personal reward, or even just for the fun of it. In Apex, you drive for the good of the company you helped found, and your reward is better sales, a robust product line, and a growing body of happy employees.
It’s not a game that could be made today, and not just because Apex hit the market and died six years ago. This is a game about the car industry as the American dream, where a couple of guys with some know-how and a prayer can take a hand-made car to the races and change the world. Thanks to our modern financial system, this is now a less believable premise than the one in Dead Rising 2.
Apex is available for a miniscule amount on the aftermarket. Microsoft claims it’s backwards compatible on Xbox 360, but it really isn’t: it not only has the typical BC audio issues, it also introduces significant control lag that makes the game more or less unplayable. It’s certainly not worth it for the increased picture crispness.
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Tags: apex, burnout, gran turismo, joe keiser, need for speed, racing, recession, xbox
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the Economic Recession has been pretty hard on us. some of my friends lost their job because of the massive job cuts. i just hope that our economy becomes better in the following years.
the economic recession has been pretty hard on us. there is some good progress on the economy this year. i just hope that the economy will continue to recover in the following months and years.
i am hoping that the global economy would recover from this economic recession. life has been very hard with these massive job cuts.
Economic recession created huge unemployment rates around the world. I think the world economy is already on the road to recovery.
the economic recession made a lot of workers jobless. my best friend and me lost our jobs because of job cuts. i hope that our economy would recover soon.