Slicks 'n' Slide

The Good
One word - groovy. This game is totally cool, and I still think that 7 years on.

Slicks ‘n’ Slides offers a variety of vehicles you can race from motorbikes to tanks, and flying saucers to cars. There are heaps of them, and they are all lots of fun. You zoom around the track, of course you can configure how many laps you want to do, whether you want a one-off race and specify the track, or go through all the tracks in a championship fashion.

The tracks are all very cool, some with jumps, puddles, sand and oil spills etc. There are over 20 tracks for you to have a hoon on. You can leave behind little skid marks if you want that option! It’s just so cute and there are so many options.

The multiplayer part of this game is what made it for me. Sure enough I played it a billion times on my own, but to have up to four people all crammed on one keyboard battling it out was just a riot! I was on the keys by the Q key, one cousin down by the <> keys and another on the number pad. Man, the dirty tricks we would play to win.

The Bad
The computer players were excellent, and my cousins always beat me. I can't really find fault with such a cool game. If there are any problems with it.. the amount of coolness it has surpasses and erases them from my memory.

The Bottom Line
When looking at small cute racing games, you can't get past Slicks. Excellent against the computer, and even better against friends and family.

The Good
Overhead racing at it's best!! SnS provides one of the funniest gaming experiences ever, especially if you are in the market for covert-action office gaming. The premise is that you race in a cute little car against 3 other cute little cars in some cute little racing course while avoiding obstacles and collecting power-ups that you later use to upgrade your car (get better handling, acceleration, speed, etc.). The charm of the game is how it all takes place in a single screen where the tracks are crammed with loops, ramps, crazy curves, and all sorts of little details. Racing the cars is simple and fun, and the whole ordeal brings back the joys of racing toy cars with your friends and inventing impossibly cool tracks while not worrying about such things as physics simulations or crap like that.

Graphics-wise the game uses simple colored sprites which make for clear and colorful images similar to those little window games that used to come for free with floppy disks, this style fits perfectly in the game and only raises the illusion of racing tiny toy cars around a plastic track.

The game also comes with an excellent multiplayer mode where up to 4 players can join in the action on the same pc! Since the interface is super-simple, all the players can fit on one single keyboard, and while it gets cramped it's tremendous fun, especially since elbow jabs are the order of the day! You'll be in one hell of a funny ride as you try to get to that wrench faster than your buddy in the hopes that it will allow you to get that acceleration upgrade and keep up your score as the races go by!

The Bad
Nothing I can think of, except that this isn't exactly "high-end" gaming...

The Bottom Line
Perfect for some funny office racing, manages to blend exciting gameplay and a rock solid interface into a fantastic little game that can get you lost for hours on end.