tiny cars race hard
win the race: bonus! but then -
lose the race: bogus!
Additional Comments:
Another all-time favorite from the NES era, Micro Machines has got to be, hands down, the best racing game for the NES. I remember renting this nearly every weekend while living in the middle of nowhere one summer. Having nothing else to do, renting NES games and watching MTV were pretty much my only options and I could only withstand so much Tom Cochrane, so I spent a lot of time experimenting and exploring the interestingly themed tracks in this game.
A top-down racer, Micro Machines pitted tiny cars in some mundane, yet rather innovative environments: jeeps on a breakfast table, boats in a bathtub, helicopters in a patio garden, open-wheel racers on a pool table and so on - simply awesome! Each vehicle type has its own unique handling characteristics, which in some cases, such as the tanks, is extremely stiff or in others, such as the sports cars, is so damn loose that you're fighting just to stay on track. There's still a section in Crayon Canyons that I can't figure out how to perfect where a binder/ruler combination precedes a sharp corner at the desktop's edge and then you need to quickly line the car up for a single-wide ruler bridge. Not only did I desperately fight my way through this section, but I noticed the AI is apt to plummet to their doom as well.
Besides the aforementioned Crayon Canyons, the tracks do start getting extremely technical as the game progresses and it becomes more of a situation of ferociously battling the course layout as opposed to your rivals. Fortunately, each character has their own unique driving style and it becomes quickly apparent who's good and who's not. And combining that with that fact that every third race, the lowest ranked driver is given the boot, it's easy to predetermine your rival line-up so that you end up racing all of the slow-movin' dimwits on the harder tracks near the end of the game.
All in all, for being an unlicensed game, Codemasters created a fantastic racing game in an era where racing games were pretty much bleh. Although F-Zero, which in my mind revolutionized the racing genre, was released the same year, it was still a few months down the road. Of course, there were arcade classics like Out Run (ok, technically it's not a racing game) and Super Hang-On ported to the Genesis, but it was still a good while before I could get my hands on either of those. And besides, none of those games are top-down racers. So then, what games do we have to compare? RC Pro-Am? Super Sprint? Ivan "Iron Man" Stewart's Super Off Road? Yea, they're descent games (actually, I like Super Off Road), but they're nothing compared to Micro Machines. The creativity in the tracks alone here can put those games to shame.
Oh! How can I forget to talk about the music? Well, maybe because there's little to no music in the game. That's right, the whirs of tiny engines is all you hear (which turns out to be rather amusing for the helicopter races), but the game does have a gem of a song: the Menu Theme. Huzzah!
One final thought I figure I'd throw out there: although I haven't played the 2 player mode since I first played this game way back when, I do remember it being a lot of fun. But then, I was also a kid back then, so who knows.
Rating: 4.5 Topples' boxes out of 5
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