"It's like a lame ball that was run over by a stampede of lame horses who, prior to the lame trampling, were of eating some lame oats on a lame farm."

After sitting through Jim Carrey’s theatrical masterpiece “The Majestic,” a chum and I exchanged a conversation similar to this:

Me: Dag! That movie was lame.
Friend: I know. It was just, like, a big pile of lame.
Me: Yeah. Then it’s like a big old lame truck came and drove all over it. Then that lame truck broke down, making the pile lamer still.
Friend: Then some guy poured a bucket of lame juice all over it.
Me: And when he was done with the juice, he threw the bucket that once contained lame juice at that pile.
Friend: Then some lame guy came and beat it to death with a lame stick.
Me: Then a lame country’s air force came in with a couple thousand lame-52 bombers and dropped some lame bombs on that pile.
Friend: Then that lame bomb spread the pile to all parts of the world, each part of the pile growing into a pile with a level of lameness equal to that of the original.
Me: Yeah. Lame.
Friend: Yeah. Way lame.

The tête-à-tête kind of dwindled to a grunting match at this point, but the point of conversation remained clear through the night: that movie was lame. Way lame. Almost as lame as Sonic R.

---The Ratings---

Oi Vey! A Dingo Stole My Understandable Gameplay Mechanics!: The rules of the game make no sense, and the title of this section has been named accordingly. None. For each of five levels, on of which is dastardly hidden, you must collect five coins at the request of some unseen race master. A coin-loving race master. He also has a certain fondness for Emeralds, so he wants you to pick up a sack of those while you’re out. And as long as you’re up and about, he’d also like you to run around a couple poorly designed tracks. You know. For exercise.

It may seem like another Mario Kart rip-off when you pick it up and play, but once you realize that winning the race has little or nothing to do with victory, things begin to look a little shady. A little really shady. -3-

The Lame Visuals: I’m not a particularly picky person when it comes to graphics, and I’ve tolerated quite a few Smash TVs in my day, but when somebody comes along and ruins the design a beautiful character like Knuckles of Sonic the Hedgehog fame, then things have been pushed too far. I’m only one man, with only one sense of broadmindedness; I can only put up with so much, so, to sum things up, I will simply list a few things that went wrong with the graphics in Sonic R: they screwed up the classic Sonic character design, making knuckles look like Mr. Game And Watch and Amy look like Mrs. Cunningham from “Happy Days”; the frame rate, which should have been a smooth x^nth frames per second with characters this blocky, crawls to a slow and bloody death when the race starts, and to a slower and bloodier death when other characters march on screen; the levels fall victim to unbelievable levels of draw-in, and the developers were to lazy to even add fog in an attempt to hide their disgraceful disgrace. -2-

The Slightly-Less-Lame Music The way I see it, this game would’ve been much better off if, instead of screwing around with all that actual ‘videogame’ part of the videogame, the designers of Sonic R just recorded a music CD. The songs are clear and magnificently orchestrated. The lyrics are coherent and well-written. The music rocks. To bad the game you play it to sucks.

In fact, maybe it’s better if, instead of thinking of Sonic R as a ‘game with music on it,’ we think of it as a ‘excellent music CD with a horrendous game attached to it.’ That way, this afterthought of a videogame doesn’t seem so bad. -9-

The Actual Racing: Hideous. Absolutely hideous. The strategy is almost as nonexistent as the competition; it’s actually been proven that an untrained schizoid aardvark with controller stapled to his back can beat the computer players even on the highest difficulty. In most cases, you end up lapping the competition once, if not twice, per three-lap game. In the immortal words of Axem Ranger: “El sigh-o de magnifico.” -3-

The Blatant, Unconvincing Sarcasm: I really think you should buy this game. It’s a really productive way to spend your cash. The characters are sooooo not poorly drawn, and the gameplay is soooooo not completely horrible.

Oh. And in case you couldn’t tell, I was being sarcastic! -10-

The Track Design: The Sonic series is known for it’s engaging level design and clever gimmicks. Rest assured, Sonic R is the black sheep of the series. The levels have nothing to do wit Sonic and everything to do with a late-night marketing meeting-born cash cow. The levels are generic. Way generic. There’s a snow level, a beach level, a factory level, a city level, a “crazy” level. A pity; they forgot the obligatory lava level. -3

The Colors! Ay, Marry! The Colors: They’re bright! They’re everywhere! They’re loud! It’s almost as if, in the place of good gameplay and quality graphics, the developers slipped in a couple thousand colors, assuming their target audience (the deaf-mute-blind children of the world) wouldn’t know the difference. -7-

You Put A Terrible Unsightly Blemish On An Otherwise Great Franchise, Sonic R!: And I hate you for it! -Why!?!-

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 01/01/02, Updated 01/01/02