Cruis'n USA

"The first racing game in the N64 is not fantastic."

Welcome to my first review. The first racing game (the first of MANY, by the way) in the Nintendo 64 was not very bad, but the great number of flaws made it to not be liked by most 64 owners, when there are by now available so many better racing games like Mario Kart, Extreme G and others. Nevertheless, I like this game's concept: races in real life-like roads in a route throughout an area (in this case it's the USA). The game did well in this subject, however it featured too many races in the West America, specially California. To the review.

Graphics: 8/10

The game is good-looking at first, but play some races and you'll see how the graphics engine works: the things just pop up on the screen, there's nothing like fog to cover the popping-up, and the system does not succeed well into making things appear naturally. I personally don't like this, and so the game looses 2 points here. Anyway, the beautiful environments showed in areas like Iowa and Beverly Hills are very good for the time the game was made. Oh, and the cars look beautiful.

Music and Sound effects:6.5

MIDI tunes are not my preferred kind of video game music, even when some of the tunes are nice. The sound effects are OK, but sometimes the lady in the back seat is just IRRITATING. The siren is cool also. What? You don't know how to get the siren? There's a code for it....

Gameplay:6.5

Well, the game has like no story. You're racing throughout America, the only problem being that about half of the races occur in two west states. The game has what they call ''traffic'': besides the normal racers, there are (optional) cars (most of them come from the contrary direction of the race) that will come, generally at high velocities, just to make it harder to get to the end in the first position. By the way, you can only win a race if you finish it at first place, what sucks (I guess they should take this off, it belongs only to the arcade version). The player can set the difficulty, and the 4 cars (plus three hidden) are upgraded each time you finish the game in three different difficulties, the other two intermediary are there just to be there, with no purpose. This game supports only two players! That's not why these 4 controller slots are there, is it??!?
I'd like a game with much more races, and harder difficulty levels. With an upgraded car, it's easier to finish the game in the higher difficulty than it is to finish the game with a not upgraded car in the lower difficulty.
To save, you have many slots in the game, but it's strongly recommended that you use a Saving Pak, as only it will save your high scores. An addendum: when you have saved the game in the cart and want to pass your file to the Controller pak, the game will copy all of the saved files in the game. Pay attention to this, because if you have all of the cartridge's saving slots used, when copying them to the controller pak any file there will be deleted.
I hate the default control options; I suggest you to use any other configuration you'd like, because this one is horrible. I usually play the game with the D-pad, and accelerate with B (of course, I use A to brake).

Overall:6.2
This is a good game for a rent, or to make your collection bigger (it's really cheap by now), but you shouldn't expect this to be as good as your main N64 racing title should be, mainly because this is one of the N64 first games. Pick up a title like Top Gear Rally or San Francisco Rush to have more fun.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 02/01/02, Updated 02/01/02