As part of Ubisoft’s emerging attempt to improve their relationship with the PC market, they’re now going to be offering their Maniaplanet games through Steam. That means that as of today you can pick up TrackMania 2 Canyon and you’ll be able to get Shootmania Storm when it’s released in April.
Presumably you’ll also be able to get Questmania if it’s ever released, as we’ve not seen any more of it since it was initially announced.
The games, for the uninformed, are highly competitive multiplayer experiences. Trackmania 2 uses user created maps on user-run servers. The map is raced a few times in order to set one great lap time before there’s a cycle to the next one.
Shootmania works similarly, only it’s a deathmatch based first person shooter where there aren’t different types of weaponry, there’s just parts of the map where your attack will change. The more unique thing is that all attacks are based on an energy meter meaning that you’ll have to gauge whether it’s appropriate to attack early and risk being potentially defenseless or wait until you’re sure you can land a hit.
This is a strange turn of events and only possible as a recent example of Ubisoft attempting to move forward. They’ve also allowed their games to show up on EA’s Origin service and they’ve been scaling back their renowned intrusive Anti-Piracy DRM that would require players to always be online.
Hopefully this move will help foster a wider audience for their games.
