💾 Archived View for appl.garden › play › ducati.gmi captured on 2024-05-12 at 15:09:45. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-03-21)
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A mediocre bike racing game, released in 2006, and sold on Steam today for less than a dollar. The one notable thing about this game is that the entire soundtrack consists of Lacuna Coil's gothic metal. It's also a game which I really liked when I was a kid, for no apparent reason, and I am sorta nostalgic for it. I even organized a playlist for its soundtrack on YouTube.
Ducati World Championship soundtrack on YouTube
Eh, the game is very flawed. If you can figure out its weird control scheme, it's trivially easy, because you have the ability to "lean forward" which gives you better aerodynamics, improving your top speed and acceleration, but the AI never does this, so you can just outrun them all on a straight line. Cornering can be tricky on some later stages, but I was able to beat the game as a kid, so you probably can, too. When replaying as an adult, I chose to challenge myself by never relying on the leaning boost, but the game is still easy.
I tried to challenge myself further, by going into the Settings menu and cranking the "Simulation" slider to 100%, and setting the difficulty to Champion. The Champion difficulty makes the AI rubberband pretty heavily, and the "simulation" slider means that the slightest touch from one of many crazy-fast opponents sends you flying off your bike. So I basically made the game frustrating for myself, but hey, better than boring, I guess?
The game is pretty repetitive, there are very few tracks and bikes to choose from. All the bikes are Ducatis, and all the tracks are unlicensed fictional tracks (though some of their layouts are blatant rip-offs of real tracks).
The game also crashed for me at some point in the middle of a championship, and my bike was glitched out for the rest of it.
Excuse the motion blur, I don't know how to disable it.
Oh, and speaking of disabling, this game has the most obnoxious race team manager ever, constantly telling you to "accelerate as much as possible!" even when you're entering a slow corner, and *literally berating you for pausing the game*, reminding you every 10 seconds that "we have a race to win!", until you unpause. Luckily he only shows up in the later portions of the game, and you can disable him in the audio settings.
I saw that this game had an option for "merging" records from someone else's save file, for comparing the best lap times. I thought it would be a fun idea to share my save files on the internet, so others could compare lap times, maybe this could make the game a bit more fun for some. Note that there are not the fastest times, because I challenged myself to not use aerodynamics controls.
(and, yes, nobody cares about Ducati World Championship specifically, but I'd like to do this for other games in the future, too)
Put these inside the "Save" folder in the game's installation directory.
I also used this as an opportunity to test some of Wine 9.0's brand new features, namely native Wayland support, and support for running 32-bit games without relying on 32-bit libraries. Those are a pain the ass, at least on Arch Linux, because the main repos don't ship a lot of the 32-bit libraries anymore, so you had to compile them from the AUR, and compiling libraries for video codecs took absolute ages. Being able to run games using only standard 64-bit libraries is gonna make life much easier in the long run. However, you need a version of Wine that supports the "new WoW64 mode", which is currently a work-in-progress and not shipped by default.
(Theoretically there is even support for running Windows games on ARM, but I can't test this yet)
Wayland support is also currently experimental, you need to follow specific instructions to enable it, and also it only currently works with Vulkan, so DXVK is required.
But, long story short, the entire game works perfectly for me using Wayland, and without any 32-bit libraries. Great to see Wine improving even further.
gardenapple - 2024-03-09
