“Park My Car” — practice makes perfect!
Posted by Peter | Filed under Games
There have been a few little web-games along the lines of “Park My Car“, but it’s quite fun for a quick play anyway. The premise seems to be that you’re a valet parking assistant who has to park fancy cars in designated spaces for the rich and famous. Refreshingly, you actually fail the level if you squish a passing dog or that blind man who just happens to be wandering past the parking space. (Admittedly, there is at least one Mafia-style level where you have to shoot the bad dudes who are trying to shoot you while you park… as if reversing round corners wasn’t already hard enough!).
I actually found this quite a surprising challenge, because it’s got a much more realistic control concept than your average driving game. You control it with your cursor keys, but instead of instantly-turning wheels when you steer, you have to hold the key for a period of time to turn your wheels to the desired direction. Your steering also won’t automatically revert to centre when you release the keys, so it’s rather unintuitive for guys like me who grew up playing racing games on the PC! (That’s not necessarily a bad thing though.)
The graphics are clean and fairly well-made (it’s top-down, 2d), and the sounds/music is OK. I have one criticism of the interface, and that’s the fact that it’s quite hard to see which way your wheels are steering until you actually start moving (I would recommend an on-screen steering wheel or something just to give you a better idea). Also, it’s a little unforgiving in the way you progress through the levels… 3 crashes (even if all you hit was a poor frog) and you have to start over completely. For a casual game, I prefer it to be at least a little easier to get through to the later levels… but maybe that’s just because I’m still rubbish at it! 
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