Rift and the unexplained

I am playing this game Rift it’s a MMO like World of Warcraft. I was exploring this one zones looking for a person that sells PVP (player versus player) gear. After finding him and picking up a couple pieces of gear I was having alook around and decided to climb this mountain, at the top was a water fall flowing down the other side and a nice grove.

In Rift there are artifacts that you collect they are little glowing balls hidden all over the place, behind rocks or bushes or on top of fence posts it's like an Easter egg hunt. The artifacts are grouped in sets, when the set is complete you turn it in for a coin which you use to buy gear, pets or mounts.

Back to the mountain on its top is the grove which is full of these artifacts just sitting there for the picking. There is one other interesting item in this grove, an unlit torch planted in the ground. This torch is very hard to see but the fun starts you go stand next to it, the torch lights up a bunch of squirrels start dancing around the torch. I have no idea why this is here or what it represents, I could Google it to find out but I think I will try to discover the meaning on my own. unexplained.

Oops I Purchased Need For Speed Shift 2 Unleashed

So today I pick up NFS Shift 2 Unleashed on Steam and it was a mistake. I read some reviews and they were all good, it got a Metacritic score of 85 but the game just came out so there is not that many reviews to base the score on. I should have spent more time on the various forums and I would have made a different choice.

NFS Shift 2 is a racing sim with really good graphics, good car models but the problem is car control. To start the game begins with you in a 2 lap race to judge your skill and it's like driving a boat, you have to turn way before the corner and wait for the car to turn in. This can be fixed by changing the sensitivity of the steering that can only be changed from the options screen on the main menu and it's not accessible from the options in the start menu, that means you have to wait for the first race to finish.

The biggest problem with this game is that every car has 4 wheel steering, every time you turn the front of the car in the back of the car turns out like there's a pole in the middle and it makes it look like the car is drifting on every corner and even when changing lanes on a straight away. When you go into a corner next to an AI car your rear end turns outs hitting them while the AI car tracks nicely thru the corner.

That is the other issue any contact with the AI cars in the game causes them to stick together and turn 90 degrees. At speed on a straight away you touch a car in the back and both cars turn 90 degrees, but at leased the crashes look good or they would if NFS Shift 2 would not change to black and white every time your car hits anything.

The good thing maybe is you are able to sell all purchased cars for the full value of the car and it's upgrades, so you can buy a car try it out then sell it and buy another one I think a tryout feature before you buy would be better. I hope they are able to fix these issues quickly but I don't think the car control is something that will be fixed anytime soon if at all.