Original Release: Unreleased (developed by Take-Two, 2000)
What would have been the first Carerra game had it made it to shelves, fans of the slot racers would instead get a superior title for the GBA in 2001.
Carrera (GBC, Take-Two, unreleased)
How to Emulate: coming soon!
Review by: C. M0use
If you’ve never been into slot car racing you may well not recognize the name, but Carerra is one of the biggest brands in the hobby. I dunno how adaptable this pastime really is to video games since the appeal seems to be largely in the social aspect and mechanical tweaking/aesthetics of your actual car, but this unreleased title is definitely not a good example of how to do it.
I also dunno how much of this is owed to it being unreleased, but it seems FAR too easy to go flying off your little slot rail. Whenever that happens, the race immediately stops and you reset for another 3-count starting light. This gives it literally the worst pacing of any racing game I’ve ever seen. I guess this is done because you’d have no hope of catching up if the race was allowed to continue while your car was re-slotted, even if the delay was only a few seconds, but all this tells me is that maybe strict rules of slot racing are not a good choice for a video game adaptation.
The best part of it is selecting from the big goofy roster of characters for your slot career, which includes vampires, monks and everything else. It does seem like there are lots of modes of play and little details to tweak, but also you have to click through like 20 screens just to try out a one-off practice race, and it all seems like a little much unless you aren’t already deeply into the hobby.
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