With many games you realise what they're aiming for and
how they went about trying to achieve it. Sometimes you realise that there were
key issues in creating such things and that due to overwhelming restrictions,
they tried their best with what they had at the time. Some games come through
as being gems with potential that maybe the next generation of console would
have been better overall for their intentions.
And some games should have been terminated at inception,
with the proposer, the designer, the programmers, testers and marketing
departments. Games so terrible and horrible that their very existence is a
blight on humanity's soul. The type of games that you would never give someone
even as a joke unlike any Barbie game, which just is a big playful slap to the
face. These types of games however you give to someone on the understanding
this person will, or already, hates you.
These kinds of games are the ones that earn people street
beatings, in public, with their family and kids around.
I defy anyone to actually get this game and play it AND
like it. A bold statement, I know, but this is one of THOSE games.
Sometimes with games you realise that they're trying to
jump in the bandwagon and make a name for themselves. Mario and Sonic ruled the
platformers series in the 2D days and while chars like Bubsy, Bug, Zool and
such all took a shot at the platform crown, these two have seen off all
attackers, staunchly. Likewise the king of carting games pretty much is the Mario
kart series with occasional attempts over the years from the Kongs, Crash
Bandicoot, Konami's random people (love the Pyramid Head racer guys!) Sonic
even trying to grab a slice of the pie on the cart racing though Nintendo seems
to have gotten this one down to such a fine art that there's few decent
competitors for the title. Not those other games are bad, but the Mario Kart
series is just so well developed now, that even good games are over looked.
This game though... I'm not which game they were trying
to replicate but they fucked up in all recognisable ways and likely others I've
never seen before in all my years of gaming.
As far back as I can remember, split-screen racing has
been a staple of a lot of games over the years. From the C64 I can remember
Pole Position, Kick Start 2 (already reviewed, thanks), Top Gear, Mario Kart,
Gran Tourismo, various World Rally Championship games, and so on to name but a
few that stick out in my mind. The Super Nintendo version of Mario kart being
one of the most played games I've had on the console in my youth, but in
acquiring THIS GAME I was sadly exposed to one of the uglier undersides of the
gaming library.
This game tries to be a racing game. A split-screen
off-road buggy racer that competes you and possibly a (soon-to-be-no-longer)
friend, against each other and multiple AI racers on dirt tracks against each
other. You've your standard, steering, optional gears (never played with gears
in any arcade racer, I leave that to my actual car where it's FUN to use them),
and an optional gun that shoots out to hit other racers to slow them down.
That's the idea anyway.
Let's take a look at the history. Myself and my cousin,
hired this game from a shop going on the blurb on the back, looking for a
racing game of sorts and this offered 2 player action, shooting the other
racers and seemed to be presented fairly well. I should note this was back
before the internet was available and people could readily access reviews and
such websites. If they were available I'd have gone straight online and sought
the names and addresses of all the people involved and tortured them badly with
a whole assortment of things from my garden shed. Most likely the spiders.
This is also likely why the internet wasn't invented
sooner, to wait for me to stop wanting these people gone.
So we took this game and paid our rental (I know, renting
SNES games, those were the days) and ended up heading home to slap the game
into the console and booting it up. Already the cracks were starting to show.
The game's presentation was very weak, nothing really being done within the
game to showcase what it could do or what it offered. The music was an assault
upon the ears and we opted to play the game with the sound down on our little
TV. A first for gaming.
Then we started playing it and that's probably where my
inspiration came to actually review games, sadly one I realised only recently
but better late than never.
The game sets up, gets ready to play and looks like the
usual split screen affair of games at the time like Top Gear and Mario kart and
that's really where the game differs. The frame rate stutters along like a
backfiring scrap heap of a car. The refresh rate is so slow that by the time
someone has been seen they're already processed as have over taken you and gone
into the distance, your only time to see someone is when you fly past them,
they fly past you, or you're level with them very briefly. Shooting at them is
beyond a joke, you can't aim accurately with the limited frames of animation of
your vehicle and with slow refresh and lowered frame rate, and your bullet is
there for a second and gone. Even successfully hitting someone slows them down
so slightly that it barely seems to have done anything and when you stop
shooting them, they speed right back up to what they were before the change. So
the one extra function in a racing game to help you overtake; lets you pull
level at the MOST effective it can be.
This game was clearly rushed.
The levels and races are bland and repetitive,
backgrounds and the tracks themselves are indistinct from each other and the
music grates heavily upon the brain with its awful synths best left to crappy
old Midi libraries labelled under "What the fuck were we thinking".
As I mentioned earlier in the review, sometimes you
realise that games were made with a lack of firepower and strength that later
generations of consoles could manage. Sometimes you play a game realise that
split screen tends to be slower and missing something that full screen has. In
some games a full screen, single player mode, has a remarkably better refresh
rate than the split screen and usually more detail. This games HAS NO SINGLE
PLAYER SCREEN. The single player mode is just the fucking multiplayer mode
while the bottom half follows one particular AI racer.
There was never any attempt to overcome the trials and
tribulations of the hardware limitations, it's a shitty, hastily made, mash up
of code that likely was hacked together and slashed out as a means of simply
putting out SOMETHING that had racing in it to try and get in on the fat cow of
kart racing that was being used. I'm hugely grateful that the £1 I spent hiring
the game would have gone to the lovely people who ran the shop rather than the
spluttering shit-fest of a company that published this dross.
My sympathies go to those that spent a full £30 or £40 on
this pile of dogshit. If anyone has a copy of this game, please send me vids of
you destroying it for the good of future generations.
