Wacky Races is one of the few cartoon licenses that hasn’t really been given a video game worthy of the name. Previous attempts before the DC game were flawed due to technology simply not being up to the task of accurately recreating the look, feel, and last, but not least, the sounds that helped make the cartoon a classic. The Dreamcast is the first system powerful enough to provide the technology that could enable an accurate recreation of these parts of the cartoon. All Infogrames (the developer) had to do was make a solid racing game to compliment the fantastic aesthetics that the DC’s hardware would be able to provide. Sadly, not even this relatively easy goal could be achieved.
The first key problem with Wacky Races is glaringly obvious before you even start your first race. The fine folks at Infogrames saw fit to add an overworld to the game. For whatever reason, someone thought this was a good idea. Sadly, this isn’t the case since the overworld in Wacky Races serves to do nothing but anger the player. An overworld has no place in a Wacky Races game, sure it can be executed well (as evidenced by the flawless execution of one in Diddy Kong Racing), but in the case of a Wacky Races game, a game based on a license that was, first and foremost, about fun, it simply doesn’t fit.
I could forgive the inclusion of a needless overworld if it was at least done well. However, the folks at Infogrames made sure to make it as flawed as humanly possible. There is, literally, no real way of knowing where you’re supposed to go in order to race. Sure you’ve got three general areas that link together, so it can’t be THAT hard to find where you’re supposed to be going? Right? Wrong. First off, the layouts of each individual area (again, three in all) are quite vast and needlessly complex. You’ve got to find a proverbial needle in a haystack to figure out how to find an area that will trigger a race. Now once you’ve accomplished this seemingly Herculean task, the REAL fun begins.
You see, if by some miracle, you figure out where you’re supposed to go, and you manage to trigger a race event, you’ll be treated to a screen telling you that you need to accomplish even more Herculean tasks to even progress to another track in that one area. When you see the tasks you have to accomplish, they don’t seem to hard. First, you’ll have to get a first place finish to advance to the second track in that area. How hard can that be? After all, you’ve played through tons of racing games, and it can’t be too difficult to get a first place finish in a licensed racing game marketed at kids, right? Wrong again.
You see, Infogrames felt the need to make all people playing this game go clinically insane. You’d think making folks jump through hoops just to BEGIN a race would be bad enough, but they managed to magnify that by about 100 when you do begin the race. They made sure to tack on a feature that is sure to make you want to play the game over, and over, and over again until you accomplish your goal, they put in the feature that is loved by all: rubber band AI. Oh joy. The harbinger of kart racing titles. This holdover from the pioneering kart racer, Super Mario Kart, seems to be the only thing that Infogrames used as a reference tool when crafting the actual racing portion of the game. Heaven forbid they look at how fun Mario Kart was, oh no, they had to include the one thing that could ever make Mario Kart frustrating: the rubber band AI. It wasn’t enough for them to just include it though, they had to make sure to tweak just a LITTLE BIT so it became nearly impossible for the player to win even one race.
If you so much as make one single mistake, on the first courses of the game no less, you can be rest assured that you won’t win. If you don’t use a weapon at EXACTLY the right time, you‘ve just sealed your tomb. If you have the unmitigated gaul to run into a wall, you’ve lost a couple of positions. If you… eh, you get the picture by now. The game is difficult for the sake of being difficult, and it siphons most of the fun right out of the game.
Thankfully, there ARE some positive parts to the game. For one thing, the control is fantastic. You won’t be able to blame any loss on the controls due to the fantastic blend of a logical button layout mixed with good, old-fashioned responsive controls. It’s a shame that the rest of the game’s pitfalls effectively negates the one bright spot on the gameplay. But, while the game fails as an actual game, it is a dazzling audio/visual treat.
The graphics in the game are simply spell-binding. The character graphics, in particular, look just like the ones featured on the classic 60s cartoon. The game’s use of cel shading (the first game to prominently use this feature) is fantastic. The environments aren’t fully cel shaded, but feature a blend of black lines around major parts of the environment and a 3D appearance for everything else. I would have much preferred seeing everything done with cel shading, since it would have truly brought the cartoon to life, but as it stands, it’s not too shabby. Tons of minor effects round out the graphics. The characters and their vehicles each feature animation that seems lifted right from the cartoon (which, given the relatively low quality of that, may or may not be a good thing.) I for one, wouldn’t trade in this small feature. While the animation won’t win any awards, it is, at the very least, faithful to the source material.
The sound is probably the strongest aspect of the game. Infogrames went all out and recruited some of the best voice actors in the business (chief among them, Billy West of Ren and Stimpy fane) to recreate the voices of the classic cartoon. Now, filling the shoes of such luminaries as Mel Blanc, Daws Butler, and Don Messick isn’t exactly an easy task. But somehow, the new voice acting crew pulled it off. Much like the original series, only seven people were used to provide the voices for the many characters that participated in the Wacky Races.
To my amazement, the new voice acting crew sounds nearly identical to the original. I watched an episode of the show and then played the game, and was astonished at how spot-on the new voice actors were. If I hadn’t bothered to look in the game’s manual to see who did the voices, I never would have known that this game didn’t use the original voice actors. Thankfully, the voices aren’t the only positive part of the sound. The sound effects are also fantastic in the game, as is the music, which mimics the happy-go-lucky music used in the original series. The sound effects are just like the ones in the series, which means you can look forward to hearing tons of exaggerated sound effects for everything from bumping into a wall to falling off a cliff.
Sadly, the cartoon-faithful AV effects don’t make up for a poor game. While this game gets some things about the series right, like the voices and sound effects, it fails to capture the fun of the original show. I don’t know about you, but I simply can’t enjoy a game that needlessly stacks the deck against the player to artificially add some replay value. If you have the patience of a saint, maybe, one day, you will unlock the hidden characters. For the rest of the gaming population that would like to hold onto their last lingering thread of sanity, the default roster of racers will do just fine.
