Nissan has built some islands in Second Life with the intention of selling you Altimas. Whether or not these islands will you the trick, you have to give them an A for effort.
Let’s face it, if you wanto to drive a car around a track you’ll have a much better time playing a purpose-built game than you will in Second Life. Your speeds are often limited to either STOP!!!! or FAST!!!!, handling is overly sensitive, and tracks large enough to be interesting involve jarring sim crossings. Nissan has wisely dispensed with that (mostly) and concentrated instead on cute and quirky freebies.
So your Altima isn’t jus an Altima — it’s an Altima with a hover mode (wouldn’t that be nice in Real Life). Fly to the Sky Track region next door and you can try your hand a timed route in the air. The rings through which you mmust fly are spaced in such a way that you’re going to have a hard time pushing the limits of Second Life physics, but they still ake for a good test of skill. Nice.
Back on the ground, there are almost too many interesting freebies to mention, and not just vehicles. Many of these are based on Nissan show cars from Japan. Each vehicle is meant to mke a sales point about the Altima. So the wheel-like Xtronic CVT Avasphere pushes the virtues of the Altima’s Xtronic continuouly variable transmission. The 270-HP V-Questrian Ava-Suit (a car you wear) tries to sell you on the 270-hp V-6 engine available in the Altima. And so on. All the vehicles are interesting and very different from what you usually see around SL, and the sales pitch is limited to the sign where you pick up the freebie.
Non-vehicle freebies include an Intelligent Bumble-Kee pet (like the inteligent Altima key… Nissan makes my puns seem absolutely clever), a navigation HUD, and a grappling hook. If you really do feel like driving around you can scoot on over to the Nissan Road Driving Course in the region just beyond the Sky Track. Beyond that is the region for the Sentra… but that’s a story for another day. (Okay, I probably won’t get to it. Check out the Loop-D-Loop and the giant Sentra vending machine).
If you’re interested in building vehicles of your own, Nissan gives away the scripts in a nearby “factory” kiosk. It almost makes we want to get into building mode again.
The interesting thing is, Nissan achieved their goal with this one. Prior to playing with these freebies I didn’t know about the Altima transmission, or engine, or intelligent key. I’m not in the market for a car right now, but if I were… I might actually take a look. But first I have to wait for my Honda to die…
