T r a c k M a n i a ™
W h a t i s T r a c k M a n i a ?TrackMania is a series of racing games for Windows, Nintendo DS and Wii. It was developed by the French team Nadeo for the PC. Instead of following the usual trend of choosing a set car and track for playing in the game, the TrackMania games allow the player to create their own tracks using a "Block" process in the spirit of the 1985 game Racing Destruction Set and the 1990 Brøderbund release, Stunts.
In contrast with most other racing games, the TrackMania series lets the player race a track as many times as they want, until time runs out. They can choose to respawn at any time possible, due to landing upside down, going off the track or because the start did not go optimally. Although in multiplayer games multiple cars race on the same track, they cannot actually collide or otherwise influence each other.
T r a c k M a n i a N a t i o n sOn January 27, 2006, Nadeo released TrackMania Nations partly as a promotion for the Electronic Sports World Cup, and also for TrackMania itself. This free, stand-alone game has one new environment, Stadium, and many features also in Sunrise, including the advertisement panels, which show ads from sponsors streamed from the internet. The game contains 100 single player tracks, the earlier ones relatively simple in both design and gameplay, but it is largely pitched as an online game. One of the main attractions is the leader board, in which people compete for the best times and points. The top 5 players can be seen on the homepage. Nations has earned an extremely high popularity (there were almost 1 million registered online players within weeks of its launch, in large part due to the wide accessibility of the freeware game).
T r a c k M a n i a U n i t e dOn June 30, 2006, TrackMania United was announced. The game is basically all TrackMania games built into one game that includes all the environments from the earlier games, and, later, future installments of the series. TrackMania United features a peer-to-peer system so players can more easily share custom content, and a unified ranking system. The engine has been updated to include a pre-lighting accelerated system, which is used in the most recent, Stadium environment. The new system allows for more realistic shadows on high end systems. The Stadium environment has double the amount of blocks featured in the free version, including for instance dirt paths, water, and indoor sections.
On November 9, 2006, Focus announced 10,000 copies of TrackMania United that could be bought and pre-loaded online. These copies were able to be activated from November 16, 2006. The game became available to buy in shops in France, Canada, Australia, Belgium and the French-speaking part of Switzerland later in 2006, and then from February 23, 2007 in all other regions.
The game is available in the UK. It was made available in the US via download for US$49.99 on March 23, 2007 and US$39.99 on April 17, 2007. As of September 7, 2007, the game is available for US$29.95. It was made available for pre-order and pre-load on Steam on June 7, 2007 and was unlocked on June 14, 2007.
Players who previously purchased the original TrackMania or TrackMania: Sunrise can earn a daily copper bonus in TrackMania United by registering their product keys through the game.
Trackmania United Forever is an updated version of Trackmania United. It has seven environments and an all-new mediatracker. It was published by Focus Home Interactive and developed by Nadeo. It has a similar layout to Trackmania Nations Forever. It features four main modes: race, stunt, platform, and puzzle as well as all of the tracks from Trackmania Nations Forever.
T h e W e b s i t ehttp://www.trackmania.com/G a l l e r y
B l o c k l a n d P l a y e r L i s tHere's a list of players from the Blockland Forums who play Trackmania.
- MackTheHunter: "(Not Regestered Yet, please wait)" [UNITED]
- Eksi: "(I know he plays, but I don't know his IGN)" [NATIONS]
- Comatose: "ringsofsaturn" [NATIONS]
- Jaydee: "Jaydee" [NATIONS]
- Tails: "tailsxp" [UNITED]
