Tux Racer

"We all know that the theme song to Tux Racer should be ‘Zoot Suit Riot’"

When reviewing a freeware game, the outlying question that reviews are based on changes. No longer is it ‘Is this game worth my money?’ Instead, it becomes ‘Is this game worth my hard drive space?’ Naturally, the scale tends to rate a freeware game like Tux Racer a little bit more leniently, because we like things that are free, and are more likely to overlook a flaw on something that costs us nothing rather than a game that runs you fifty greenbacks.

Tux Racer could stand on its own even costing some money. As animal foot races (or in this case, belly-sliding races) go, Tux Racer surpasses the X-Box’s Mad Dash Racing and makes a run at the king of the sub-genre, the Saturn’s legendary Sonic R. For a freeware game developed in free time on the University of Waterloo campus that accomplishes all of this, I think some budgeted companies should be taking notice of these programmers hailing from Sunspire Studios.

The premises is simple: Race your penguin to the bottom of the hill within the time limit while collecting the designated number of herrings along the way. To accomplish this goal you must navigate your fine feathered friend through treacherous canyons, barren sheets of ice, and powdery snow that could allow Hermann Meier to die happy. Because the time limits generally do not allow for much leeway, it’s best to hit the Practice Mode first, so that you can learn the locations of all of the herring -- and the shortcuts -- to make your run through the cup circuit as smooth as possible.

The Practice Mode is actually where you’ll be playing more, since you have no requirements to meet and you can just race wherever you want without a care in the world. Tux Racer features a few tracks that loyal players have sent in as well, so you can get more variety for your 7.7 MB hard drive space. These courses range from the needlessly extravagant (filled with giant rock spires to inhibit your progression) to the courses designed completely for speed, on some of which your penguins can reach speeds of over two hundred kilometers per hour.

Controlling in Tux Racer is done using the arrow keys, nothing else. (Except for the menus, which predictably allow for mouse control.) The penguin tends to respond fairly quickly unless on an ice patch, so one must be careful to not oversteer. The controlling just gets quirkier from there. You cannot pause races, and if you should want to quit during the middle of a race, you will have to use the quit hot key (Open Apple + Q). That will not quit the program, only a race. To quit the program, one has to go all of the way back to the main menu and then choose the manual quit command. Odd.

Perhaps odder still is how difficult the game actually is. Freeware games are not known for providing great challenges, but the herring placements are sometimes in out of the way places, and the level time limits are a bit too low, which does not allow much leeway in your quest to complete the cups. Basically, you need to have a perfect run to advance, which gets frustrating after a while.

You really feel the sense of speed picking up the faster you hurtle down the mountain, especially when you hit an icy patch. You see, ice speeds you up, powdery snow basically keeps your speed constant, and the areas of dirt slow you way down. Of course, pulling a Sonny Bono and running into a tree slows you down the most, but I’m assuming you will not be attempting to do that.

While you pick up and lose speed with alarming frequency, the framerate is only affected when you try to change the volume of the game -- your actions within the game itself keeps the rate constant. You see, the penguin’s animation is always slightly choppy, especially at the beginning of the course, so don’t blame the frame rate!

Other than those animation quirks, Tux Racer looks surprisingly good. The divisions between the areas of racing surface are subtle so they flow together, and yet clear enough so that you never are confused when you end up on dirt. The environments have a rotating background that is picturesque, but unchanging. You can actually tell that the image was a painting made by an artist and spliced together in a cylindrical shape so that it would fit around the entire screen. (The division line is still visible in the sky.)

The washed out color scheme -- pale blues and whites, along with some darker teals for the trees -- causes the penguins to stand out against the track so you never lose sight of them, even in a deep forest. The statistics of your race are shaded a bright yellow, so they also stand out and are quite easy to read.

While the graphics are surprisingly good, the music shouldn’t surprise anyone at all. It’s predictably poor, about a thirty second anthem repeating constantly on all tracks and an additional, shorter but equally repetitive song for the menus. Both focus heavily on xylophones. As for sound effects, well, none are featured. When you’ve only got one guy doing the sound for the game, that’s predictable, but Tux Racer deserves better in the audio department.

Will you replay it? Probably. Tux Racer is the kind of short, stage-racing fare that will have you playing for a few minutes at a time on numerous occasions. It’s a great, somewhat mindless time killer, the type of games that the PCs have loads of but Mac users kind of got the shaft. As usual.

Tux Racer is a freeware game that’s better than it should be. Flaws still abound, but, hell, it’s free! Racing the coolest animal in the world down slopes that cry out for the dramamine is never a bad thing, and for the low, low price of nothing, you have no excuse not to head over and download it right now.

PROS
*It’s free!
*It’s a game about Penguins!
*Has a great sense of speed.

CONS
*No sound effects.
*Only two different songs.
*Background splicing is awfully noticeable.

SCORE SUMMARY

GAMEPLAY--8
GRAPHICS--6
MUSIC--2
SOUND--N/A
CONTROL--5
FUN--7
CHALLENGE--HIGH
REPLAY VALUE--MEDIUM TO HIGH

OVERALL--6

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 08/20/02, Updated 08/20/02