Location Test Video: Wacky Races

As promised…..

I’ll have to apologize for the shakiness of the video. This is not down to me being on a bender last night, more to do with the fact that I was on my own so I had to play the game and film and not get caught doing so. Funland is a bit funny about people taking pictures, so I had to be discrete.

As I said in my previous post the game has been made by Gamewax and Banpresto. The cabinet also had the Warner Bros. logo on it which is obviously down to the Wacky Races license.As far as I know this is the first showing of the game, it’s strange that Wacky Races has not made an appearance at any of the recent shows. I suppose it was not in a showable state or they wanted to get some income figures and player feedback before showing it to the trade.

The only things that seem to be missing from the game were two of the tracks. The whole cast of Wacky Races seemed to be there, as well as the sound affects and one-liners from the cartoon. As you can see for yourself in the pictures the cabinets got some nice touches; the seat is modeled on Dastardly and Muttley’s car for instance.

[Discuss on the Forum]

Now on to the game itself. It would be easy to write this off as a Mario Kart clone, but this would do it a great injustice. Obviously they share some similarities like cartoon graphics and power ups, but I think there is enough here to set itself apart from the Italian plumber’s racing adventure. From what I played there are 3 regular powers ups; oil slick, rocket and speed boost. However each car has there own unique power up. The ones I saw were Muttley spinning around “The Mean Machine” knocking anyone out the way, “The Crimson Haybailer” has front mounted machine guns and “The Buzz Wagon” sprouts legs and moves at a faster speed than normal.The way one gets the power-up is the craziest and possibly the funniest thing I’ve seen in this type of game for a long time. Instead of having just a button to press, you have a big one arm bandit lever to pull. This sets off 3 reels on screen which spin in a power up. Also on the cabinet are 3 reels that tell you and onlookers whether you picked up a bad, ok or a good power up.

The races themselves are point to point affairs with what appeared t be alternate routes. I definitely prefer this because it means the whole race is completely different, although it does make it harder to learn the tracks as you aren’t doing repeated laps in a race. The obligatory speed boost on the tracks were present, as well as massive jumps and drops. Races always seemed tight; I came 4th, 1st and 6th (I think), so I guess that shows it should be good for the first time player. Thier were 4 cabinets present at the Trocadero with link play. What will be interesting is if it supports more, there are 11 characters after all. Fingers crossed!Overall the game was great fun and I would definately come back to the game again. Which reminds me, it has a progress password system.

[Discuss on the Forum]