Beetle Buggin'

The Good
It's really fun to play but it can get boring after a while since the game is not a very hard to master racing game. You might have troubles in the beginning but after a while all modes become somewhat easy and mostly it's possible to win with a lower class than your opponents. The "Jump" races aren't as hard as it seems, it needs just full acceleration and a proper timing to release the nitro-booster. Since the "Monster" tracks are quite hard to master the game is still fun to play after many years. If you like Surf and Tex-Mex music (who said that it's Country?) this game offers some for you, I like it much and listen to them sometimes.

The Bad
The graphics look meager for today but racing games generally use sparse polygon models to keep an acceptable frame-rate for lower specced machines. The wheels are octagons covered with a quad using alpha blending to create a quasi circle (likewise for pre '98 racing games), the fender and the windows are "cutouts" made with a transparent overlay which leaves an ugly aliasing (an often used trick to save polygons), the cars have minimal interior and the driver is a "near to paper-cutout". The LOD is meager and overall the graphics are less good as i.e. for NFS3 and the post-processing can't cover all. The game is in my opinion a bit too easy except for the "Monster" competitions. The physics are typically unrealistic but simulation isn't the goal of this game.

The Bottom Line
Easy to mediocre to play racing game which offers fun for some weeks. It's by far no racing sim, rather a fun racing game. It suits well for beginners in this genre. The game is easy to control even with a digital game-pad (experienced players can easily use the keyboard). Sure it can't match to today's standards (it didn't even match the past standards) but it's fun to play and I played it back then on a 500MHz processor with a 64MB GFX card. Guess that if you played it on a CRT monitor it will cover many of the graphical leaks which are extremely visible in today's high resolutions and wide screens.