MegaRace 2

In The Olden Days (When The shitty pc I still own was considered rather ninja) someone invented the cd-rom drive, and everyone and their dog went apeshit. "Uncanny." said the population of earth, "it's like having 350 floppy drives all on the go at once." (Or something.) Anyway, about this time a cd game called Megarace appeared, and for some reason it sold like hot cakes. I say 'for some reason', because in actual fact the game was utter shite: it got slagged off in the press from Timbuctoo to Dubuque. Iowa.

What the Megarace programmers had done, you see, was to create a bunch of outlandish racetracks on a Silicon Graphics Workstation (or whatever) and then they kind of spooled the results onto cd (I'm not very technical, but it was something like that). The upshot of all this was that when you played Megarace it was like you were just watching a film of a road approaching you (because, er. you were), and on this road was your car - a little blobby thing - which you could move from side to side a wee tad. Accelerating simply speeded the rate of the 'movie' being spooled off the CD, while braking did the opposite. Oh, and you got to fire some weapons. Oh, yes, and there was loads of fmv between races - quite amusing fmv as it happens, starring a character called Lance Boyle - the gig being that Megarace was a really cheesy futuristic game show in which you could win prizes for doing well. And that was about it.

Cheesy but not peasy

So what of Megarace 2? Has it been done in the same fashion? Are you still simply watching a movie of a racetrack coming towards you? Is it shite? The answers: yes, yes and no. This time round the vehicles are vectors rather than bitmaps, meaning they get properly animated from all angles: they, and you, can spin, slide and so on. Then there's the fact that you can actually drive the wrong way round the track. (The graphics engine doesn't work in reverse, of course, so they've got round this problem by selecting 'stills' of various parts of the track, and the camera pans and cuts to follow your car. It's like the exterior replay trackside cam on F1GP.) The ai on the opponents is pretty cool (they weave like muthas, attacking each other as well as yourself); and the shooting of rockets and dropping of mines is pretty groovy too.

In fact Megarace 2 as a whole package, including the deliberately cheesy fmv, is pretty gosh-darned enjoyable... until you realise how bloody difficult it is to win races, and that doesn't take long - it took me ages to get past the second track, and I'm usually pretty good at these things. Still, you want to keep trying just so you can see what the next track looks like, as is always the way.

But it's still on rails

But now we come to the summing up paragraph, and it's here that Megarace 2 won't fare so well: the main reason being that there are so many driving games available (and others in the pipeline) that are just that much better. At the end of the day it does all come back to the fact that Megarace 2, even though it may not always look like it, is on rails (a thought which is always niggling away, no matter how good a job the artists have done on the backgrounds and stuff). You know the saying that goes something like: "Does the prisoner feel confined because he's in prison, or because he knows he's in prison?" Well, with Megaracc 2 it's a bit of both.

Mindscape is pulling out all the stops in their racing game collection this year. Megarace 2 is apparently a racing game where you can play alone or against a friend on tracks that will lift you up into the highest peaks of the skies. Little is known about the number of tracks and the vehicle varieties at this time. However, new information is heading this way and should be in your hands very soon.