MegaRace (1993)

Name:MegaRace
Number:245
Year:1993
Publisher:The Software Toolworks
Developer:Cryo
Genre:Racing
Difficulty:4/5
Time:2 hours
Won:Yes (108W/79L)

I know I said Streets of SimCity, but Streets is one of those games that works when it wants to work. Even if it does have a patch that mostly smooths out the bigger issues. This was not one of the times it wanted to work, so instead, it's time for MegaRace.

Welcome to the future. Reality is boring, which is why virtual reality is the best thing around. And the best thing in virtual reality is MegaRace. A virtual reality show where people like you get to drive in a supped up car against hordes of criminal speedpunks, who have disrespectful manners and threatening hairstyles. Pound them into the pavement!

He's referring to Factory Land, which is shown at night, so the desolate waste looks like water.

This is the way MegaRace's manual describes the game world. The introduction video, because it's 1993 and we get nice, shiny CGI graphics off a CD, shows that world. Not a world which is overtly oppressed. Not a world where jackbooted thugs are marching through the streets stepping on necks. A world where everyone is so bored by life. A world where safety regulations mean you can't actually have someone drive around shooting gangs of punks in supercars, so you have them do it in virtual reality.

It's a more down to Earth dystopia. There's even a joke prize where you're offered a book...until the host reveals its hollow. Which given modern trends and doomsayings feels about right, even if TV stations like the one broadcasting the in-game show are also falling by the wayside. On the other, as reaction channels show, reacting to someone else's shortcomings will never go out of style.

There's some clever worldbuilding going on from the moment you start the game. The framing device is that of a guy coming home from work to watch the show. Except that his personal robot turns the TV on before he's home. At several points the game implies there's genuine concern that there could be a robot revolution. One group of criminals is violently anti-robot, and a robot on the show is insulted, jokingly of course, but it does make me wonder if there's more to it.

He's talking about criminal speed gangs, of course.

But the thing about the guy is, all he does when we see him is watch the show and drink. There's not anything wrong with having some of the hard stuff while watching something, but the fact that he has his robot gets him a drink, and all he does is sit, watch and drink does suggest some unpleasant things about the guy. And I say this, being a member of the similarly sad eat food and watch something crowd.

The star of the show is host Lance Boyle, played by Christopher Erickson, an American actor presumably based in France. (His work is mostly French, so unless he's flying out every year that's a safe assumption) He pops up in the beginning to explain everything and in-between missions to compliment you and explain your next foes. This is his most notable role for reasons that are beyond me. Simply put, while MegaRace is a good game on a technical level, Erickson makes the game highly enjoyable.

Taken in screenshot form, Lance can look quite psychotic...when in motion he looks less psychotic.

For a long while, whenever I played this game, I kept thinking to myself how the portrayal of a game show host felt just a bit too skeevy. There's rumors about Richard Dwason, but in general the skeevier hosts were the kind that hid their skeeviness behind a false veneer of positivity. These days, it isn't uncommon for a game show to be less about the genuine skill of answering a question and more about how dumb they can make people look.

It helps that almost everything that comes out of his mouth is gold. I was spoiled for choice in picking out what I wanted to use as a screenshot from this guy. If I may sound biased against foreign games for a moment, I'm not sure why. French games generally aren't known for their witty dialog. In an era where translation usually fell to the guy who had the best grasp of the language rather than someone who knew what he was doing, this comes off as surprisingly natural. There's no writer listed, so we'll never know.

Now, if Boyle doesn't come off as too witty to you, you can easily skip his dialog with the press of a button. In a sense, this is why the game works so well. Yes, it's a FMV game with CGI graphics the rest of the time, but it knows not to take itself so seriously as to think you can't ever skip anything.

All the cars have Spanish names for some reason.

After the game finishes introducing the first city and gang, you get a selection of one of eight cars. Well, at first one of three. To unlock the other five, you need to defeat the five speed gangs. Each car has various attributes, armor, speed, weight, warning device, shield capability, number of lasers and missile capability.

Armor, speed and lasers are mostly self-explanatory. Damage, speed and how many shots come out when you fire. Guns have ammo, and I'm not actually sure if the car you pick changes how much ammo you have. The warning system tells you where the enemy car is. This is useful when it's behind you, because this isn't a race, you're just shooting other drivers. If a car is behind you, they can ram you from behind.

I'm not sure if weight has an affect on anything. One car ramming an enemy, or pushing it into the sidewall seems to be much the same as another. Guns have a far more dramatic and visible change. See, the last four items I mentioned can be changed by powerups on the track. You can get more or get them taken away. Unfortunately, I never got any shields or missiles. I did get my guns taken away, and that carries over between races.

The GUI depends on which car you use, which is a nice touch.

Once you get to the game, it's dead simple. Accelerate, stop, turn, along with a shoot button. The keys are rebindable, which is good, since by default, it's AZ<>. That's something I expect from a crummy ZX Spectrum game, not a DOS game from the 1990s. Unfortunately, you have to rebind them every time you start up the game. It isn't the worst default key selection ever, but not having them in a simple cluster always annoys me.

In each race you have to take out up to seven enemy drivers in three laps. That's it. Within about five minutes you have everything you could possibly need to finish the game. It's very easy to control and the game just plays so smoothly. It's to the point that until the later levels, I thought you had to work to actually hit the sides of the track.

See, the game's tracks are all pre-rendered CGI. It's less a movie you're just following along and more a series of images. Which I realize is just what a movie is, but it feels different. It doesn't quite feel on-rails even if it is. They did a very good job of making the game feel like more than what a lot of its contemporaries would do, which is expecting the CGI to do all the effort.

Some tastefully done self-advertisement.

Speed and aggression is the name of the game. The only time you're taking your foot off that pedal is when you've overtaken an enemy or you're on a narrow track. For the most part, the game gives you an incredible feeling of speed. The problem is that sometimes you're playing catch-up with an enemy car, and it feels like it takes forever. Which is a thing for the in-game audience too.

The thrillometer determines how much score you get from attacking things. In-universe, it's supposed to be a representation of how much you're exciting the audience. My issue is that it solely increases based on how fast you kill enemies. In one sense, this can work, seeing two cars going at 200 MPH and one is forcing the other into the side wall is cool. Just shooting the other guy? It's not that it's not action, it's just that it isn't that special.

It should reward tension more. Rather than raw violence, the outcome of the battle should be an unknown. "Is the Enforcer gonna take out Rabies or is he gonna run out of time?" Crashes and violence are cool, but you can't just throw endless, meaningless violence at people. There has to be tension. Victory should not be assured. Nobody remembers the nameless goons the hero fights, they always remember the ones they had epic fights with.

A nice view of an ammo down sign, because bullets are just too obvious!

Enemy cars are not the threat of the game, they're the target. The real threat are the tracks themselves. Not in the usual way. There are various power-up icons all over the track, ranging from mundane speed up/down, give/take points, ammo replenishment, the aforementioned gun, missile and shield dispensers, along with a skid function and various confusion effects. Then there are more exotic and hard to explain ones, like one that speeds you along a certain line.

At first, these are placed in such a way that makes it pure fun, then a bit of a challenge to avoid the bad ones. Once the gun removal starts, you start paying attention to the layout more. Then the game starts turning every icon (outside of the points ones) into traps. Speed ups in front of ammo or gun dispensers. Ammo removals in such a way that you have to go through one specific part of the screen. One particularly nasty level sets up the speed-ups so if you hit one, you'll be halfway through the track before you've stopped.

One of the nastier levels, which is narrow and constantly snakes around.

That said, there is one change to the enemy vehicles, it starts getting harder to ram them. It isn't like before where you could easily pound them into the sidewalk, reaching them gets tricky, and they start doing damage back. Never an amount that is noticeable in the heat of the action, but enough that it was frequent on the last few levels for me to die before reaching the end.

There are two sets of 14 tracks, making for 28 total levels. The game hides this by making the two sets based on difficulty. There's an easy and a hard difficulty, which correspond to how much the game decides you shouldn't have guns. I beat the easy set, and while the game does automatically start you on the hard set afterwards, it feels less like the game continuing and more like the game automatically put you in new game+.

There are two kinds of bonus levels. The first is a points level. The brakes on your car are disabled, you're shot forward at max speed, and oh, enemy cars are driving towards you. There's no penalty for dying, it just feels like filler. There's also one you get where if you lose in the middle of the game, but do so after doing some damage to the gang, you get a second chance. This is easier than the later stages, so chances are you'll see it once or twice.

While I make it sound like the game is complex, in the moment to moment action, most of this really doesn't matter. Unless there's a nasty symbol on the ground, I'm mostly just trying to get to the side of a car and ram it into the side of the wall or just shooting him. You just memorize the trap layout. It's well-designed enough that this doesn't feel too annoying.

In-universe, this is a tribute of NewSan to OldSan, out-of-universe, I can't blame them.

One issue I have with the game is that it constantly, and I do mean constantly, crashes. I sat down to one session and the game would either crash at the end of the first stage or the second I hit an enemy on the second. Or if I forgot to rebind the keys, it would hang on the score screen. These weren't easy crashes either, I had to restart DOSbox. Once you get past the second level, the number of these crashes drops off significantly.

It's been remiss of me to go through all this without mentioning the game's soundtrack, six slick techno tracks made by the same guy who did the Dune soundtrack, Stephane Picq. The six tracks correspond roughly to the six different locales the racetracks are set on. They fit thematically with the tracksets they're on, but I feel like they're lacking just a bit in aggression. This perhaps isn't quite a bad thing, since memorable is better than ear-splitting, but it feels more like a bad commute that fighting for my life.

With that, onto the rating.

Weapons:
You can ram into things, shoot them, or if luck is on your side, hit them with a missile. 2/10

Enemies:
There seems to be some level of AI variation, and gang leaders seem to be tougher than regular thugs. 2/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
There's some decent variety, and difficulty being the only real cause of level reuse is better than a lot of alternatives. 5/10

Player Agency:
Simple, smooth and fun to use. Whether I've meant to or not, this is the game I've been mentally comparing all the racers around it to. 8/10

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
Despite the absurdities, this feels like its own, full-fledged world, with dozens of little things hiding just behind the corner. I believe that one corporation made an underwater city, and that another company then hired some thugs to move there for entertainment purposes. 8/10

Graphics:
Despite how aged it all looks, for the most part its avoided the weaknesses of the era. Outside of CGI humans in the framing sections. There's still some spectacle here, when you can force yourself to look away from the action. Seeing this game in true, modern 3D would be really cool. 5/10

Story:
The charm here is more in the writing, but the different take on a cyberpunk dystopia is intriguing to me. Rather than overt violence, people seem to be complacent in their own oppression. 5/10

Sound/Music:
The sound design is excellent. I feel the pounding of my car against his, or the slow shredding of the side of a car against a wall. The music is very good too. 7/10

That's 42, which is oddly, the fourth such title I've given that number.

MegaRace is one of those games where what are its arguable positives can function as its flaws just as easily. The amusing commentator, the simple and easy to pick up combat could just as easily be someone else's annoying jerk and depthless spinning of wheels.

Next time, it's time for something else mega, Jill of the Jungle.