A Review: California Speed, N64 1999

California Speed is an arcade-style racer developed for the N64 by Atari Games and published by Midway Games in 1998. The game was first released as an arcade-only title for the Atari/Midway Seattle Arcade Systems in 1997 before it was later ported. Play consists of choosing a car and then completing a series of races and championships, with stunts and time trials included.

I didn't enjoy this game as much as I was hoping and found that it was yet another one of those arcade ports that simply shouldn't have been made. As a sit-in arcade game, I could see this doing fairly well and making a steady profit as kids all bumbled into it for some quick, cheap thrills, but that's about it. As a home console game, it just doesn't have enough meat to make it worth playing. The gameplay doesn't feel as smooth and clean as I thought it should, with the controls being just like an arcade system—an all-or-nothing affair. Either you have to give max inputs and get almost no response, or you so much as gave the control stick a glance and your car was off licking the nearest wall. It was so frustrating trying to get a handle on the controls that I gave up for the most part and just resorted to smashing and crashing around the various tracks. This game also felt and played like it was a one-to-one port, with no extras or new features for the N64. In a single word, I would say that this game felt very 'lazy'; there seemed to be no concern with adding anything aside from basic functionality. I found that the computer-controlled racers were rather blunt at best and, at times, just plain stupid. They seemed to run on rails, and they were there almost more to populate the game than to provide any meaningful competition. Their difficulty was very much linked to the players performance rather than any type of well-programmed AI. Something else I noted is that this game seemed to run at a lower frame rate than it did when it was on arcade hardware. This is very much true when there is a lot going on at once, as the game seems to crunch and slow down. There was far too much stuttering, and this made racing on some of the more colourful tracks nausea-inducing. Again, I feel that this game should have stayed on arcade machines rather than being ported to home consoles, and it is one of those games that I completed more because I felt I had to because I had already started it over any real desire to actually play the game for what it was.

The visuals for California Speed were actually rather good, as opposed to the gameplay. The cars were well modelled and looked pretty good from car to car, make to make, and looked pretty close to their real-world inspirations. The roads were a little basic but looked okay overall; they were at least clear and well marked. I thought that the backgrounds were fairly pretty, and they seemed to be of a rather decent resolution when compared to some games. I liked the HUD and thought that it told you everything that you needed to know to succeed. The world environments were a little rough around the edges, but they were good enough for when you were hurtling past them at speed. I thought that the billboards and signs looked pretty good, if not a little stretched sometimes. The bridges and certain other points were rather lazy, though; using one-dimensional pictures to depict cars waiting in traffic looked terrible and stuck out like a blinking nose. I didn't see the need for the girls in bikinis at all either; they seemed out of place and were way too high in terms of image quality when compared to the rest of the game. It was like you could see where the effort went, all for some cheap titillation that I would have rather not had in exchange for some better-looking traffic.

Overall, I was disappointed by this game, and although I have completed it, I kind of wish I hadn't wasted my time doing so.

 

3/10 – Played With A Grumpy Face!
Signed Off – Leonardo – PSJ