Original Release: Infogrames, 2000, Dreamcast/PS1/PC
Other Releases: PlayStation 2 (2002)
The first Wacky Races game takes a fairly standard kart racer approach, and was among the first games to employ cel-shaded graphics
Wacky Races (PS2, Infogrames, 2002)
Where to Buy: Amazon
How to Emulate: PlayStation 2 Emulation Guide
Review by: C. M0use
Wacky Races is a strange title. Not in that it exists or the license choice, it’s a pretty obvious property for developers plumbing for The Next Mario Kart to hit upon. I mean the design choices are strange. The cartoon featured more cross-country Cannonball Run type racing, but this one is in closed loops with what are essentially go-kart tracks. It employs cel-shaded graphics, but they don’t look particularly cartoony and the characters only sorta resemble their Hanna-Barbera counterparts. It’s aimed primarily at kids, but the cartoon had its first run in the late 1960s and its second in the late 70s-early 80s, the “kids” that enjoyed it would have been 30-ish when this came out (and there wasn’t any kind of modern revival of the cartoon until over 15 years after this game was released). It’s also viciously difficult, like to an excessive degree that I can’t chalk up to anything other than bad QA and/or rushing the product.
It specifically apes Diddy Kong Racing more than any other kart contemporaries, with an “Adventure” mode centered on a similar hub you have to drive around. It’s far more of a pain in the ass to navigate and feels more pointless (and I didn’t even really care much for Diddy Kong’s hub). Fortunately, you can ignore all that and still have substantial gameplay available. Pick “Arcade” mode instead from the title screen and you get an experience more like typical Mario Kart, with single-track racing and Cup modes that can unlock stuff.
Good luck unlocking anything, though. Between jank and just some crummy design decisions, Wacky Races is more punishing than the average kart racer right out of the gate. It sometimes feels more like a Sega CD FMV racing game, in that you’re meant to stay in the middle of the pack right from the outset and use the right weapons at the right time to get clear of them temporarily. If you fall behind at all, you’re friggin’ done-zo, even on the earliest tracks on Easy mode. You get the pleasure of the obnoxious announcer blowing you up for it constantly too, even at the beginning of the race when you haven’t had a chance to do anything yet. “LOOK AT PLAYER 1 HE’S IN EIGTH PLACE!!” Yeah, because you started me there and the race is only five seconds in! Asshole.
Anyway. Success in the game is heavily tied to timely use of weapons, and each character gets their own unique set of three weapons/power-ups. These are fed by generic tokens you pick up on the track, which you can spend to use whichever of your abilities you like. However, the tokens can also be knocked out of you by other players and dropped back on the track. On paper I kinda like the idea of every character having unique abilities, but in practice here it just makes some of them much more useless than others. The best set of abilities I found was the Munchkin Gangster Gang, who get a machine gun that stuns other players for a couple seconds as well as a speed boost. But this is another area where starting in last place or falling behind at all puts you at a severe disadvantage, as the computer robotically vacuums up every token it can reach.
There’s a lot of little design jank that makes racing even more of a headache. If your vehicle gets unbalanced by the side of the track or some kind of uneven terrain, it takes forever to recover and you’re basically finished. Some of the track layouts are also cluttered and confusing without clear paths forward, making it hard to tell where you’re supposed to be going unless you see other racers ahead of you doing it first.
Perhaps the biggest offense is putting Dastardly and Muttley in the title, then making them unlockables that will likely take you forever to get. It’s hard to just win races on the opening tracks on Normal mode let alone unlock new characters.
One impressive element is the voice work, with a robust selection of clips for each character done by (AFAIK) a completely new cast of actors. And the music is decent enough. Pretty much everything else in the game needs some level of work, though. I think this was more beloved (and people were more tolerant of its faults) on the Dreamcast in its original form, when the console was really lacking for titles comparable to Mario Kart.
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