Carmageddon 64

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Carmageddon 64; Nintendo 64
Topic Started: Jan 9 2008, 12:38 PM (164 Views)
Mop_it_up	Jan 9 2008, 12:38 PM Post #1
Dark Birdo Posts: 5,141 Group: Admin Member #24 Joined: August 8, 2006	The original PC version of Carmageddon was a street racer where you were awarded extra points for running over the many pedestrians wandering the streets. The main complaint I'd heard about the N64 version was that Nintendo forced the developer to replace the pedestrians with zombies, and color the blood green. That sounded manageable, but little did I know, the game has far too many flaws for me not to believe it was released only out of spite. Grain. In your cereal, it's a good thing, but when it gets into your video game, that's when it becomes your worst nightmare. Although there's no fog, the graphics are so grainy you'll check to make sure you aren't watching a twenty-year-old VHS tape. It is so hard to distinguish which way the directional arrows are pointing, what's a power-up and what's a rock, and even the computer cars. The animation is stiff and choppy, and the framerate is comparable to the 3D games featured on the SNES. Distortion. Often used with techno music for goofy effects, but it shouldn't be present in a video game. When the music has the sound quality of a damaged vinyl record, it doesn't matter what the tunes are like; they will be bad no matter what. At the start of every tune, there's even split-second spurts of static. The sound effects not only suffer from this same poor quality, but also lack of variety as well. There is only one engine noise, one tire-screech noise, one zombie splat sound, and maybe three different collision sounds. The game is also supposedly in stereo, but unless I'm deaf in one ear and don't know it, it's monaural. Thought. Most people have lots of them, but none of it went into this game's controls. With any of the three control settings, either the A or B button is used to accelerate. Switching the view, selecting an item, and using an item are all done with the C buttons, which makes those actions impossible to perform without releasing the accelerator. The abort button is always L, which is a poor choice for something that is used quite often. But all of this doesn't matter when one of the most basic fundamentals is missing; if a racing game can't even implement analog control for steering, there's no coming back from that. Fun. It's what we all want, and the last place you'd expect it to be absent is in a video game. There are essentially three courses: a city setting, a mountain quarry, and the woods. Each of the game's tracks is composed of a specific combination of roadways and passages from each course, which, combined with the hard-to-spot arrow markers, makes getting lost extremely easy. Although there are only a few checkpoints per track, they are small in size, and if you don't drive directly under the checkpoint sign, it will not register. Checkpoints have been deliberately placed right after sharp turns or large ramps, which makes it likely to miss one and not even know it. Zombies. I thought they were talking about actual zombies, but the computer cars act just the same. The AI in this game is so simple-minded, I've never even seen an AI car finish a race. All they will do is try to wreck each other, and sometimes, you, which brings me to the damage system. If your damage meter is depleted, you go boom. Pretty much everything causes damage to your car, including hitting ramps, going over small bumps, and even holding the accelerator during the initial countdown. You can repair your car by pressing R, which comes at the cost of credits. Credits are earned by ramming other cars, running over zombies, and finishing races. Even the one thing that supposedly sets this game apart from other racers – running over zombies – is poor in execution. They very rarely appear on the racing course; often you'll go an entire race without seeing any. You'd have to go out of your way to find them, and you wouldn't have enough time to kill very many anyway. In the first few races, you get lots of time to complete the race, which means you can zoom on ahead and will likely never see the computer cars again. In the later races, you won't get nearly enough time to finish a race, and time bonuses can only be earned by ramming other cars. It essentially becomes a destruction derby as you'll have to crash the computer cars in order to “win the race.” Carmageddon is a game that has failed on all counts. It has blended graphics, it has unbearable sound, it has poor control, it doesn't have any racing thrills, and it doesn't even come close to the only goal it originally set out to achieve. By trying to implement too much, it has overlooked the basics of a racing game and ended up going nowhere. Carmageddon is not only the worst racing game on the Nintendo 64, it is the worst game on the Nintendo 64. Overall score: 1/10
	===MISQUOTE OF THE MONTH=== ""I vomited eleven times today, what's your excuse?" -dataDyne


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