Trials HD - Its lack of multi player is perplexing

I finally got around to buying the excellent Xbox Live Arcade game, Trials HD. For those of you who have not played it, the game involves trying to ride a motorcycle across insanely deadly ramps and obstacles without falling to a grizzly death. Although the visuals are 3D, the gameplay is strictly 2D, so all you have to worry about is accelerate, brake and leaning backwards and forwards, making this one game that's completely trivial to play but challenging to master. The game is a riot especially with friends (and a few beers on hand). All the more reason why I don't understand why there was no multi player mode of any kind put into the game. Even if full on split screen or XBL multi player was outside of the budget of the game, it would have been trivial to implement a "hotseat" (take it in turns to beat your friends time) type of mode. Anyone who has played the excellent Trackmania hotseat mode will know what I mean. In spite of this oversight, I'd still highly recommend the game to anyone.

Trials HD is (to my mind anyway) a remake/re-imagining of the old 8 bit classics, Kickstart and Kickstart 2. It's great to see an old game concept bought back to life with new console technology, but with the core gameplay mechanics left in tact. I don't think Kickstart/Trials would have worked in full on 3D, lining up the jumps and ramps would just have been too frustrating.

I can think of a few other 8/16bit classics that should be given a fantastic new remake, but I'll save that for another blog post.