Wacky Races Review (PS1)
It's the way out Wacky Races! Only it's not so wacky and there's not much of a race going on to speak of...
Developer: Appaloosa Interactive
Publisher: Infogrames
Platform: PlayStation, PC
Release Date: 15th December 2000 (UK) 15th January 2001 (NA)
At 8 years old within my first year of having a PlayStation my games collection was steadily growing. One day after school I came home to find my mum had neatly organised all of my games into a box. It was a nice surprise. “Now keep them in there. Keep them tidy” She said, or some such remark. “And look very carefully through them…” She added ominously. And I looked through what there was; there was CTR, Muppet RaceMania, Spyro 2, Batman & Robin, uh huh, all the familiars but I’m not seeing what’s differen— oh. By an even nicer surprise, mum had snuck in a new game amongst my collection; Wacky Races. I had seen a few episodes on TV as a kid at that point next to a lot of Tom & Jerry, Hong Kong Phooey and Top Cat on video or BBC 2, so I was aware of it. To my child mind seeing a video game exist of the show made me think there was the potential for almost anything to exist as a video game. That night, no homework was had because I was stuck on there but good. Well, for maybe 3 hours at least. But over the autumn months everyday after school and the best part of the weekends I remember trudging through it. I found it hard but I did enjoy it a lot. I also remember letting a neighbourhood friend play it and he unlocked Dick Dastardly, but I was never particularly good at the game to unlock him myself.
Thank god kids don’t have many critical thinking skills because while I was aware of some faults and foibles in the game, its greater flaws became much more apparent to me as an adult.
The game is very minimalistic and cheap in quality. Sure, they got an impressive cast with Jim Cummings, Billy West, Greg Burson, Gregg Berger, and even Janet Waldo reprising her role as Penelope Pitstop from the original show, lending a great vocal authenticity to the game. But it all falls apart in presentation and gameplay.
There are 6 playable characters; The Gruesome Twosome in the Creepy Coupe, Sergeant Blast and Private Meekly in the Army Surplus Special, Penelope Pitstop in the Compact Pussycat, the Slag Brothers in their Boulder-Mobile, Peter Perfect in the Turbo Terrific, and of course Dick Dastardly and Muttley in the Mean Machine, who is only unlockable after winning all the championship races, of which there are 5 championships in total. Of course, there’s single race, time trial, practice and multiplayer too. There is also a replay theatre where you can save replays of your favourite races but I never saw any use for it.
With the 10 minute animated shorts finally making their way to 3D, the races last about as long as the episodes do, or at least it feels like it. That’s because the cars move so slowly and the framerate is so low it gives no sense of speed—apart from when you use a speedboost which rapidly shoots you forward— which is bizarre considering when you pause the game while being struck by lightning or passing a river you can see it can reach high framerate speeds as the animations of the lightning and flowing river move smoothly. Perhaps running the 6 racers with their combustible weapons is just too much going on for it, even though other racing games handle it just fine— Crash Team Racing for example. But for whatever reason, technical or otherwise, as minimalistic as the game already is, it can’t match the speeds the game needs to be to make for a fun wacky race.
What also doesn’t help is the controls and the gameplay. The controls are slippery, stiff, and floaty in all the wrong ways. It’s all over the place. Even when you unlock Dick Dastardly, miraculously, who is supposed to be the best character in the game with the highest stats, controls just as badly as everyone else, if not worse. A tap of right or left and you zip off wildly in that direction. There’s no control over him. No wonder he loses all the time. And the Slag Brothers, they’ve barely just understood the wheel. Steering and handling might take another millenium for them to grasp. Penelope and Peter are your best bets for decent characters.
The poorly designed tracks don’t help either. As nice as they look visually, keeping faithful to the cartoons, they don’t accomodate the poor controls at all. The tracks are themed around a canyon, woods, city, and snow with 5 variations between the 4. How they are designed is broken. The layouts involve poorly used crossroads, shortcuts, traps and hazards, obstacles, climbing spirals, jumps and nonsensical turnoffs. Navigating these courses becomes a headache to get around, let alone trying to win. After the third run of tracks they become a nightmare. The city theme track Down & Town 4 has you race up through a car park, leap off a ramp into an adjacent car park, then descend down and out to the finish line. In theory it sounds alright, but climbing the first floor you can be launched off into an alley between the buildings and get stuck, and then launching off the ramp on the second floor into the next car park you can either go too fast and smack into the roof and slow down or overshoot it, or not go fast enough, clip the lip, land in the alley, and have to work your way back around and hope you can get enough speed. But once you mess that up there is no hope of winning this race. This track caused me so much frustration it stopped me playing it for years. The tracks are so badly designed even the AI has trouble getting around sometimes.
Otherwise, like all novelty racing games, you get unique items to use but none of them are really worthwhile and getting hit by them isn’t fun as the AI can be relentless at times. You get 3 tiers of items; orange, blue, and purple, as well as a meter rating up to 3 so you can use up to 3 items stored up. Orange ones are your character specific items which pressing L2 will make you hover and fly forward while R2 shoots a projectile of some sort; Gruesome Twosome’s dragon fire or Slag Brothers’ boomerang. Blue is tech items replacing your L2 items which will give you a speed boost, sirens that’ll slow down other racers around you, a protective shield, or inflatable tires which… I still have no idea what they do. Maybe make it easier to drive off road. Purple items are more assault replacing your R2 items giving you a lightning cloud, beehive, mine, oilslick, missile, fallen trees and a brick wall. The latter two items drop in front of opponents ahead of you making them stop suddenly. But if you’re not careful, you’re likely to crash into your brick wall as well, as collision detection is awful in this game. Crash into a wall, lampost, brick wall or tree, or even another racer and you’re gonna get hindered building further frustration.
It is baffling to me how bad this game is. From the menus and presentation to the gameplay, it all feels cheap because most of the budget probably went to the superior Dreamcast version, which was later ported to the PS2 a year later. It’s like Infogrames’ focus was on the Dreamcast version and forgot last minute “Oh yeah, we’re doing one for the PS1 while that’s still around…” like they half assed it.
Graphically it does look alright. It looks plenty cartoony enough and is faithful to the cartoon, even if there is some typical PS1 graphical glitches here and there. The music is cartoony enough as well if forgettable and still pretty cheap sounding. But overall it’s just a frustrating afterthought. Because of all of its flaws that they didn’t consider to fix or maybe just didn’t have the time to refine, there is no satisfying challenge here, just enduring annoyances.
Is the game good? No, it’s a terrible racing game with nary a budget to support it. None of it is as wacky enough as it needs to be. Instead it’s just an annoying hinderance. Was fighting through the game to unlock Dick Dastardly even worth it? Not in the slightest. He only gets a unique L2 item to use while is R2 is any purple item and is just awful to control. There are some good ideas for a good game here, but it can’t reach those impossible heights it’s scrambling for on a tight budget. Much like Dastardly hopelessly scrambling for a trophy win. Whoever this game is for I’m not entirely sure. Easily entertained kids, Wacky Races fans, and PS1 racing game enthusiasts perhaps, for good or bad.
This game only holds mainly nostalgic value for me now. I look back on it fondly but it is an example of “This is worse than I remember” as your naive child mind is hard to see fault in things. I’ll get the itch to want to play a few races of it every few years or so, but of the two versions released I vastly prefer the Dreamcast/PS2 version.
Where to Purchase (As of 15/11/24):
eBay: £10- £60 / $40- $240
Amazon: £20-£25
CeX: £10