Looney Tunes Racing Review (PS1)
Kart racers were everywhere in the 90's/2000, so of course you would need one with these loons!
Developer: Circus Freak Studios
Publisher: Infogrames
Release Date: 16th March 2001 (EU), 13th November 2000 (NA)
Platform: PlayStation, GameBoy Colour.
I remember back in 2008 I first looked into PlayStation emulation. I was only 16 and astounded to find out just how many games you can get a hold of through emulation. One of the first few games I remember trying out was Nicktoons Racing and Looney Tunes Racing. Nicktoons Racing I had played before as a kid borrowing it from the library and thought it was quite laggy. Turns out it always had been and wasn’t my computer, but it was still as fun as I remember it to be. Looney Tunes Racing, however, I never played before and I don’t think playing it on an emulator made for a good first impression because even then it was just as laggy and the audio was buggy too. Though, it turns out neither of those was because of my computer either.
Infogrames’ string of Looney Tunes and cartoon based video games was continuing on strong into the new millenium. And kart racers were rather popular with Mario Kart 64, Diddy Kong Racing, and Crash Team Racing all coming out in the late 90’s. Even Disney got a finger into it. So what else could Infogrames do if not make a kart racer themselves with the gang from Termite Terrace?
Looney Tunes Racing sees its huge cast of characters all racing to compete for the Acme cup and a wish granted by their host Smokey the Genie, though only Bugs, Daffy, Lola, Taz, Marvin, and Wile E. get cutscenes seeing their wishes granted. There are three game modes; Championship, Single Race, and Acme Challenge. Championship comes in three difficulties or tiered challenges, with a different number of tracks to race through; Rascal with four tracks, Stinker with five, and Despicable with six. Single Race is pretty self explanatory and Acme Challenge sees you completing 15 challenges over three floors. These challenges include time trials, racing under special conditions, and collecting items with the last challenge racing against a secret character to unlock them. Upon completion of these challenges you’re awarded medals in either bronze, silver, or gold. Collecting all medals you possibly can unlocks the next floor and collecting all medals rewards you with unlocking the Acme Museum movie where also each challenge completed will reward you with an Acme item. For multiplayer you have battle mode, race, or Wacky mode which sees random events occur.
There’s a good deal of challenge to this game. The Championship mode is fair, with each cup getting trickier in difficulty and racing at higher speeds but none too unreasonably difficult to accomplish. Acme challenges are tricky and will occupy your time enough trying to get gold all around. The races against the unlockable characters can be the most trickiest, I found. They can be cheekily fast so you have to pick someone just as quick and easy to handle to try and cut corners as best you can in these short oval tracks. Once you beat these challenges it’s very rewarding though.
The game modes work pretty well, but I would have preferred a proper championship cup mode like what CTR and Mario Kart do. That lets me down when a kart racer doesn’t have that. Though here it works alright.
For a PS1 kart racer, it’s pretty solid and there’s easily worse ones to play. Of who to play as, there’s an impressive 19 characters in total to choose from and they are:
Bugs Bunny
Daffy Duck
Lola Bunny
Marvin the Martian
Tasmanian Devil
Wile E. Coyote
With secret characters to unlock:
Duck Dodgers
Elmer Fudd
Evil Scientist
Foghorn Leghorn
Gossamer
Granny
Hector the Bulldog
Pepé Le Pew
Porky Pig
Rocky
Smokey the Genie
Sylvester
Yosemite Sam
I can’t really recall any other Looney Tunes game having that many playable characters except maybe Acme Arsenal and Space Race but they don’t even come close to it. For that you’re pretty spoilt, especially with how deeply they dug for really obscure characters. When picking your character they drop a one-liner and of course they have the best cast to voice them and do them superbly well. Considering how many characters there are I’ll just link the cast here, but like any good cartoon kart racer you constantly hear their screams and shouts and snappy remarks bringing a great life to the game. One really confusing thing, though, is when selecting Duck Dodgers he says lines that the Scarlet Pumpernickel says, so perhaps that’s what it was supposed to be originally? I’m not sure, but I do not understand why Duck Dodgers would be saying those lines. But each character has a uniquely designed kart for them and each plays differently with some having greater acceleration and handling than others. It’s standard for a kart racer but it adds great diversity in each character you play as.
As with any kart racer, X is go, circle is use item, square is brake, R1 and L1 is to drift, though it doesn’t drift and boost the same way CTR and Mario Kart does. But it does have the green boost pads which zip you along cartoonishly. Still, they all drive pretty well. But one of the best things about this game is it does a fair bit to make itself unique against other kart racers. In Mario Kart and CTR you smash open a box and get an item and collect coins or wumpa fruit to go faster and get stronger weapons. The items work completely differently in this. You collect tokens, or what look like poker chips to me, that number 1, 2, and 3. You have a meter of 6 items and for each token you get the meter fills up from a custard pie, bomb, lightning cloud, homing custard pie, anvil, and the inevitable invincibility and minor speed boost. I think this makes item gathering more strategic instead of random gets. So if you want to take everyone out with the anvil you have to carefully grab 5 tokens to fill up the meter so you get the anvil, or grab a 2 token so you can drop a bomb behind you, or just keep collecting enough so you’re invincible as much as possible.
Another thing that makes it unique is throughout the tracks there are Acme arches which activate gags in the track that can cause harm to other racers, or yourself if you’re not the one who activated it. Crash Tag Team Racing later did something similar to this, but this is perfectly Looney Tunes in activating context sensitive areas of the track to cause even more mayhem in your favour. These gags can range from boxing gloves firing from cliffs above, Elmer shooting lighting below, pianos falling, traffic crossing, and even trouncing sheep (I guess Sam Sheepdog decided to let them run free today). It’s a great little addition.
Its one other strength is its visuals. It does look pretty impressive as it very creatively captures a lot of iconic backgrounds and settings from the cartoons such as Duck Dodgers’ city with its giant probing eye watching over you as you cross the finish line, Planet X and its weird and winding paths and bizarre surroundings, Martian Platforms looking exactly like Jones’ shorts, and More Opera Doc? emulating What’s Opera Doc? with the fat horse, travelling from the beautiful gardens into Elmer’s eery mountain valleys complete with giant looming shadow of Elmer. There’s a lot of greatly designed tracks including one set on the WB lot inspired by the short You Ought To Be In Pictures, desert tracks inspired by the Wile E. and Road Runner shorts, and some set in Evil Scientist’s castle lair. You get a lot of character cameos throughout these tracks as well, such as Sam Sheepdog in Forest Frolics watching over his sheep as they leap onto the track, Road Runner streaming along in Desert Dash, and Gossamer interferring with racers in Dungeon Disasters, which is funny considering how he is also a playable character. You can get doubles a couple of times thinking about it. It’s funny when you’re playing as the Scarlet Pumpernickel Duck Dodgers while also racing against Daffy. But the tracks themselves aren’t too complex, they’re easy to navigate, save for the bonus tracks which are also fantastically designed. Wackyland is completely black and white and straight from Porky in Wackyland, Planet Y is a complete oval track racing on the ring of the planet, and Acme Factory you race through the chaotic factory where all its gadgets and items are made. These tracks are difficult to win but you only race them in single races so it’s fine if you don’t win them because you don’t exactly get anything for it. Be nice if they were of a cup race though.
And as for the characters and their karts they look pretty great as well. They’re very well animated with stretches and bounces to them, and their karts are appropriate to them. Bugs races a carrot, Daffy a duck’s bill, Wile E. a rocket, Foghorn a tractor, Porky a plane. They seemed to have a lot of fun designing their karts which is great because it comes through in its playfulness. Arguably because of the variety of characters to choose from, how they play and wanting to see their karts this makes for a lot of replayability. I feel a little spoilt with the characters.
Its biggest glaring fault sadly is the audio. It has this horrible issue of looping. As great as the cast sounds sometimes a lot of their lines will loop over and over as they’re repeatedely hit. The music tries to work adaptively but it becomes incredibly patchy and broken. For the most part the soundtracks copy music from the shorts or famous opera pieces but even then it sounds low quality, like that of a straight to video/DVD film, which is also a shame because some of them could be great songs to race to. When it copies classics such as Hungarian Rhapsody or The Barber of Seville it butchers them. I appreciate its efforts but it ends up creating this messy and hideous patchwork of a quilt that makes no cohesive sense whatsoever. It’s like a broken record caught on a loop repeating the same few seconds over and over again before jumping to a completely different section of the song and looping on that. Even the music on the main menu will eventually drive you looney because of its incessant looping. What doesn’t help is when you hit a boost pad it cuts to another diddle of a tune before resuming its previous looping. Some tracks don’t particularly suffer from this problem but it is much more apparent in others. Sometimes the music will even just outright stop leaving in this awkward silence until you either pause the game or hit a speedboost kicking it back into play again. I can tolerate it early on, but after a little while of playing it gets very annoying, even if I am heavily distracted by the gameplay.
I love a good kart racing game, they’re some of my absolute favourite games and will always try out as many as I can. I think weirdly most kart racing games I’ve enjoyed aren’t always Mario Kart either. But this one I’m a little indecisive about. I love how differently it plays to other kart racing games and trying to put new ideas into the genre, I love the visuals and I love the cast of characters you can choose from. It has decent enough challenge to it. It plays pretty solidly if not always perfectly because of some overly handled characters. It will keep you plenty occupied and reward you nicely for your time spent. But the audio is where it makes it trip up on a wire and gets a piano dropped on top of it. If it wasn’t quite as ambitious and had more time worked on it to straighten it out, it could easily have had a fantastic soundtrack to it and one-liners that could repeatedly be hilarious. Everything else is fine, it’s just that. Still, I guess 2 out of 3 ain’t bad.
If you can look past and tolerate the sound issues, it’s easily worth a try because it is otherwise a rather fun and unique kart racer. It also had a GameBoy Colour version released which basically played the same as Wacky Races on there, but it’s alright too. If this had a sequel I’m sure it would’ve fixed all of those problems, especially on the PS2. Although, there is another kind of Looney Tunes racer on there…
Where to Purchase (As of 21/09/2022):
eBay: £7-£35
Amazon: $40-$60
CeX: £10-£20