Race Drivin'

"The world was not ready for 3-D racers back then..."

... this game is proof.

This is a bad racer by THQ, where you get to pick 4 cars then choose between 3 different levels.

GRAPHICS : 2/10

Polygonal, polygonal, polygonal. Bad ones at that, the cows are a square and 2 triangles. The background is very plain, and not very colourful, practically, just green and grey. The cars are a laugh too, they're rectangles, hoo boy.

FRAME RATE : 0/10

3-5 frames per second, anyone?

GAMEPLAY : 2/10

OK, when you first pop this sucker in. You get the title screen, quite a lot of copyright material, don't you think? Next, you pick one of 4 cars, and I fail to see any difference between them. Now there's 3 tracks you can choose, a boring Autocross track where you just drive, boring. Next, there's a more fun Stunt track, where there's jumps, a loop-to-loop and sharp turns. Last, there's the Super Stunt track, where there's this weird stretch of road that goes into the sky and goes down again, and is impossible to get past. The screen is horrible, only about a fifth of the screen is dedicated to the playing field, so you gotta sit close to the TV to really see what's happening, giving yourself a headache in the process. The rearview mirror is pointless, whenever you pass another car a 2-D sprite of a car appears, then disappears, pretty pointless. The jumps are stupid, if you go too fast you fly metres into the air and crash into the ground. OK, crashing, you might actually have fun in this part, whenever you crash, your windshield cracks and you see an instant replay of that crash, and you'll laugh at the cheesy goodness of your car landing then sprites of orange smoke covering it up, attempting to look like your car blew up. Another bizarre thing is when you crash into a blue line (representing a river I bet), you seem to bounce back from it, I wonder what they put in the water? After your time runs out, you input your score, only to have it erased when you reset anyway, and that's the game. You can uncover what this piece of garbage has to offer in 15 minutes.

SOUND & MUSIC : 1/10

Music stinks, there's 5 pieces in the game, the title, which is just a rock music bit repeating over, the name input screen is kind of the same thing, then there's the car select screen, just a bunch of blips, the game over theme is blips too. Then there's instant replay, this one I find so-so, because I get the hang of it because I find crashing to be actually fun. The sound is repetitive as well, I don't think they tried here, there's actually about 2 sound effects in the whole game, the engine roaring, and the explosion. The explosion sounds more like someone just farted into a microphone. Awful.

OVERALL : 2/10

Unless you're curious about the supreme badness about this game, take a pass at it. I give it a 2 and not a 1 because I admit I still like to play it on my emulator sometimes to do some crashing, that's probably the one part they made semi-successfully.

Should I buy or should I rent?

Please take a pass on this one, unless you're curious about the game's awfulness. If you get this game for free you'll still feel ripped off. If you want a racer try the Top Gear games.

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