Carmageddon

The Good
Carmegeddon is a game I heard a lot about before playing it. It was after watching an episode from Lazy Game Reviews (check out his YouTube channel, it is very cool) that I eventually decided to buy the game along with its expansion pack and sequel from Good Old Games and after spending some hours with it, I discovered that this game is much more than just plain controversy.

And oh boy, was this game controversial. It already starts the moment you boot the game up. After an awesome intro movie, you get to the main menu and your cursor is nothing less than a severed hand with blood dripping from it! Yeah, that already tells you that this game is not for people with weak stomachs. And it just gets better from there on!

In Carmageddon, you compete in races all around the USA. You can win the contest in one of three ways. Passing all the checkpoints just like in a usual racing game, eliminating all the other racers by ramming into them or killing all pedestrians! Obviously, it is very tempting to just give the racing rules the middle finger and go out on a macabre, all-consuming rampage.

This game is extremely violent and has a ton of black humor. When you drive over pedestrians, they will scream out in pain and you will hear their flesh getting torn off their bodies. Slam into them with enough speed and they will swing towards your screen with chunks of man meat flying everywhere. Your wheels smear their guts over the concrete and you can keep on driving over their ripped open carcasses while looking around for your next victim. And if that wasn't enough, your driver dryly comments to the events that "shit happens" or sarcastically says "sorry" after driving over someone at speeds over 100 km an hour.

In addition, Carmageddon is about as addicting as it is bloody. As you complete races, kill pedestrians and ram your competitors out of commission, you gain credits which you can use to rank up. Unlocking new tracks and better equipment. You start at level 99 and you will have a lot of driving and slaughtering to do in order to reach the coveted level 1 rank.

When it comes to locations, you have city streets, countryside, industrial zones, mines, snow covered mountains and more! The game's timer is very generous and it is quite easy to get your timer well over ten minutes. It certainly encourages you to explore the entire map because the race track itself is just the tip of the iceberg. There are plenty of more locations to visit and people to kill when you go off the track and just drive around like a freaking maniac! Go to the beach and watch people in swimming trunks running for their lives. Visit the fields and mountains and see cows shit all over the place (literally) just before your turn them into raw steak saignant! Mmmm!

When exploring the maps, you will also find plenty of power ups and game changers. These power ups vary to extra time or credits all up to turning your ride into a bouncing machine or making it shoot electricity to zap everything you come across into a cooking, bleeding mess! Just make sure to avoid the cops, because they will ferociously hunt you down. And in case your car gets beat up or turned upside down, no worry! You can always have your car fully repaired or recovered as long as you pay for it (and you can even get into debt in case you're out of cash).

Music and sound effects are excellent. The music consists of industrial and thrash metal music with tracks made by Fear Factory as well as originally composed tracks. The soundtrack is fast, aggressive and agitating and perfectly sets the game's atmosphere. Finally, the sound effects are gruesomely crisp. Driving over someone who is already dead or about to be dead makes a painfully squishing sound and cars make screeching, ear piercing noises as they crash into walls or into each other.

The game's graphics aren't bad but not much to write home about. Much of the game is in 3D except for the pedestrians which are sprites. It definitely adds to the gory beauty of the game as polygon pedestrians would have looked awful given the time this game was released.

One last thing I want to mention is how great the game controls are. I personally never expected a pc racing game to control so smoothly. You only need to use the num pad and a few more buttons to handbrake, repair and recover your ride. That is all. No controller or steering wheel needed, just a good old keyboard.

The Bad
One thing I miss in this game is a genuine commentator. It would certainly be fun to have a game host making fun remarks about whatever ridiculous stuff you do in the game. For example, a good line after running over someone would be "Let's hope he enjoys his new tattoo" or "don't worry, you'll get a full life insurance refund for that."

Some customization for your car would have been great. Although you can unlock cars, you cannot change anything when it comes to aesthetics. It is therefore impossible to change your car's color or to add cool gadgets like spikes, hooks or other hardcore equipment.

Speaking of unlocking cars, you may think that you use credits to unlock your opponent's cars but no. You have to thrash your opponent's car an unknown random number of times in order for it to unlock. The game offers no requirements to meet in order to unlock a particular car is a matter of patience and dumb luck. And if that wasn't enough, you cannot unlock every car you see in the game. Yeah, talk about some unnecessary car teasing.

And of course, do not play Carmageddon if you dislike violent and politically-incorrect entertainment. Then it would be easier to French kiss a cobra rather than enjoying this game! But if you have even a little dark, sadistic edge, than you will enjoy this game as much as I enjoy killing bunnies with axes. Ok, just kidding, I kill them with chainsaws after driving over them with my monster truck while wearing nothing but a pigs mask on my head! Yeah, talk about bunny genocide!

The Bottom Line
A true classic in the racing genre, Carmageddon's outrageous, violent gameplay will keep you satisfied for a long time. The pc platform may not have that many racers, but with the Carmageddon series, it certainly has a big pawn on the board of racing franchises. This game definitely belongs to the collection of every self-respecting gamer. Go get it and enjoy that feeling of getting warm internal guts into your hair and face. Let's roll!

The Good

Easy to jump right in and play

Intense bursts of speed

Great track design with surprising amounts of freedom

Ridiculous physics are entertaining

Great sound effects

Grisly but cathartic deaths

Plenty of visceral moments and feelings of vertigo

Crashes actually give the feeling of impact

Addictive arcade style gameplay

Fun multiplayer

Cool cars

Good vehicle damage models

**The Bad**

Some people may be turned off by offensive content

Uneven difficulty curves

Some bugs break the game in various ways

Putting in a password on each startup is annoying

Extremely ugly, outdated graphics

Earning brand new cars left up to random chance

Redbook audio is always a pain

Runs in DOS despite 1997 release date

Dares don't really amount to anything

**The Bottom Line**
In 1975, a film called "Death Race 2000," starring the late but great David Carradine (Best known for the legendary "Kung Fu" television series and the more recent "Kill Bill" films) was released into theatres. The concept was basic: A cross country race as a form of entertaining and pacifying rowdy and restless civilians; the twist being that this race isn't about coming in first place, the winner is chosen by how many innocent civilians and other racers are killed in the process. The film wasn't well received, many critics and parents were offended by the films tasteless content. It was excessively gory, almost every female character in the film whipped out their breasts or went stark naked at least once, and the films sense of humour was extremely morbid and bleak, treating vehicular manslaughter and sexism as comedic relief. The film did gather a cult following (Including my wife & I) and whether you like it or not, it is arguably the prototypical "Blood Sport Opiate" film, appearing over a decade before "The Running Man," which is the film most people think of when dealing with a premise involving a blood sport as pacifying entertainment. You're probably asking yourself, "What the hell does this have to do with Carmageddon?" Well, it has a lot to do with it. Carmageddon is clearly inspired by the film, in fact during its development process, it was going to be titled "Death Race 2020" and presented as a tie in with the comic book of the same name, intended as a sequel to the film. However, they could not keep the rights to the franchise and the name was dropped but in truth it can still be called a Death Race video game. Save for a complete lack of breasts (Sorry, nudie fans), the game mimics the film exactly, from its tasteless sense of humour to its ridiculous amounts of gore and disregard for the laws of physics. Unfortunately, this lack of tact might turn a lot of people off which is a shame because if you look past this element, its one of the most entertaining games ever made and it would easily make my top 10 games of all time and there's almost no competition when it comes to being my favourite racing game, the closest being Need For Speed 3. The game is presented like your standard 3D racer, but it pans out very differently. The game is much more arcade focused, based on score more than pole position. This allows players to jump into the game quickly and not have to worry about falling into 8th place immediately and working tirelessly to get all the mechanics down. At the start of each race, you have a time limit like many other racers, but its not too hard to bring this time limit up. You can increase your time limit by getting points, which are achieved by damaging or destroying enemy vehicles, running over pedestrians, or getting time bonus pickups. You lose if your time limit is up, but this is rare, though keeping a high time limit is a good idea and the higher your time limit, the more points you get when you finish a race. Finishing a race can be achieved in multiple ways as well. You can do it the old fashioned way, going from checkpoint to checkpoint and doing laps, but since pole position doesn't matter you will often focus on racking up points while moving from checkpoint to checkpoint. You can also win a race by destroying all your opponents. Vehicle combat is very fun and no doubt inspired games like Burnout as you beat your opponents by crashing into them or staging elaborate crash scenarios. This is a lot of fun because the game really packs a lot of punch into the crashes, and you feel some impact whenever you make a high speed crash. The final and most arduous way to win a race is to kill every single pedestrian. Even though it is cathartic to run over pedestrians and you will no doubt kill plenty racking up that score, its not worth going after every civilian because there are hundreds and it can wear thin driving to every nook and cranny to find them. The tracks are elaborate and well designed. They are extremely large and encourage exploration, which also adds to the replay value. There are several alternate paths that lead to more pedestrians and power ups, which often have bizarre but undeniably funny results. Some power ups do have standard invulnerability or speed boosts, but the ones that are the most entertaining are the ones that stick a monkey wrench in the already over the top physics, such as the power up that makes your car drive on only two wheels and collects scrap metal and giblets or the power up that makes you bounce around. Nothing blows off steam like picking up a bounce power up and bouncing randomly into a herd of cows or bouncing an opponents car and literally flattening it. The physics are over the top, and I wouldn't have them any other way. The game is extremely fast and visceral. You'll fly through the air, spin around, bounce, flip, crush, get crushed, and defy the laws of physics in every way possible. But it only adds to the fun. The speed and physics are detailed despite being so silly, and you'll often get that funny feeling in your gut that you get when you go down a free fall or a slope in a roller coaster. This makes the game thrilling and fast paced. The biggest problem with the physics is that the controls suffer for it. The controls are slippery and cornering is pretty much impossible unless you are a god. You'll spin out of control all the time and while this can result in entertaining scenes, it can get annoying when you are trying to focus on getting to the next checkpoint, getting a specific powerup, or trying to ram an opponent. The game supports a joystick, but they are very hard to configure and they are just as slippery if not more so. The arcade style can be addicting, not only is it simply fun to climb the score board, the developers have added a few hooks to keep you playing. To progress in the game, you must progress a ladder. You start at rank 99 and will increase in rank for every race you win. Depending on your score, your rank increase will range from 2 to 6. This system is a little stingier in harder difficulties, but this is to be expected. You beat the game once you reach rank 1, and if you own the "Max Pack" version of the game like I do, there is a second disc that has another campaign that is equally good and addicting. There are some confusing aspects of the core gameplay, mostly revolving around how to get new cars and "dares." Dares are occasionally given by other racers, but they don't really have any requirements and don't bode any rewards. No cash bonus, no point bonus, no bonuses of any kind, and all the dare does is swap your position at the starting grid; which doesn't even effect the gameplay anyway. The only change your position in the starting grid makes is that there is a bonus for whoever splatters the guy waving the checkered flag first. Its a completely useless addition, and it could've easily been used for bonuses, in fact it could've been used to put you and your opponents cars in the pot and if you won their dare, you get their car, if you lose, they get yours and you have to go back. Speaking of acquiring new cars, this is another confusing element. In most racing games, you use cash to buy new cars. Here, cash is used to upgrade your car, but not to buy new cars. The only way to get new cars is by random chance, which is a majour pain. Once you reach rank 89, you have a chance of winning an opponents car, provided you destroy it in the match. There is no threshhold for what car the game will reward you with and whether or not the game will even give you a new car is random. This is frustrating, especially when you are stuck with only one car half the game and the more exotic cars come in. Naturally, the cooler the car, the more the player will want it. There's a car in the game that zaps lightning at pedestrians, not only is that cool, it would've made it easier to keep a good time score while going for checkpoints. It took me literally 8 years to finally play a match and get that car, and by then I didn't really care and was pissed off at the random chance aspect. Multiplayer is fun, though it is disappointing that only 2 players can play the 2 player mode. Granted, there will still be AI drivers, but it would've been cool to have all 8 cars player controlled. Regardless, its a lot of fun to play with a bud and set up tug of war mode, a mode where you and your bud fight for the top amount of pedestrian kills in two separate track areas. The sound is excellent. The screams of pedestrians, soft bellies bursting underneath your treads, metal scraping, loud crashes, squealing tires, cheers and hollers from your drivers and so much more all sound great and make the action even more stylish. The game has a CD based soundtrack with some cool heavy metal, but sadly it uses Redbook Audio. If you don't know what Redbook audio is, let me sum it up. Redbook audio was a method used by early CD based games where the audio and the data would be separate tracks, the data would have its very own "track" while the music was placed on separate tracks and burned exactly like a music CD. This was done for two reasons; one, it would save space on the disc and the hard drive because the music wouldn't have to be copied to the hard drive or coded into the data. The other reason is because not everyone had top of the line audio cards and audio cards were still fledgling, and often couldn't handle CD quality audio without bogging the system down, but with a Redbook CD the sound card would only render the sound effects and the music would be run by the CD drive itself. The negative is that most modern computers don't like Redbook audio, its nigh impossible to get it to play the music, and even if it did work, a scratch on the disc and a single skip in the music could cause the game to crash. The last thing I wish to address are the graphics. The graphics are TERRIBLE. It would be believable that this game was made in 1995, but the fact it was made in 1997 is ridiculous. The game suffers from texture warping and pixelation. To avoid suffering migraines, you have to add a command line for hires mode, and even then it still looks outdated. Save for the cars, which have cool details and great damage modeling, everything is a pixel and levels are often very boxy. Granted, many of them take place in industrial and modern city environments, but it'd be nice to see some more curves. The sprites of the pedestrians are low res and are rendered in 8-bit colour. Come on! 8 bit colour in 1997? It was outdated in 1996! The best that can be said about these sprites is that the deaths are gruesome and detailed, and the crimson blood looks great. I will grant the graphics some amnesty, I can understand that in 1997, a game with so much chaos on screen and tons of moving sprites mixed in with the chaos might be bogged down, and a racing game without speed is like a shooter without a gun. It also doesn't help that the game is Dos based. There is a Windows 95 executable on the Max Pack edition, but ONLY on the Max Pack edition and even it doesn't look much better, in fact unless you use the highres command line, it looks worse than the dos version. You are not given a choice of resolutions, and the maximum is 640x480, with the standard being 320x200. There is also the option for Glide rendering provided you can find the proper patch, but the Glide render only works with the dos version, and getting the DOS version running fast is arduous enough without having to configure and modify the DOS executable with a glide wrapper on modern computers. Regardless of its issues, Carmageddon is one of the most fast paced, intense, visceral and downright entertaining arcade racers. Its insane, addictive, highly replayable, and if you aren't offended by its violent content, very cathartic. Carmageddon knows how to be one thing: Unabashed, brutal, intense FUN. Realism doesn't drag it down and there is never a dull moment.

The Good
A SCOTUS Judge sits impatiently as he listens to lawyers bickering about video game law. One argues that video games are pushing the boundaries of art and any attempt to categorize them will be short sighted. The other argues that they have unnecessary levels of graphic going to mention games where players are allowed to urinate, and encouraged to beat up hookers and go on drive by shootings. The judge feels a bit of vomit in his mouth. He finds it disturbing that people like to perform these virtual acts of sadism and call it “entertainment”. He doesn’t remember the day when the screams of 500 grannies were silenced by the screech of burning rubber, made by homicidal car drivers. Those drivers, they will never forget what it was like to be out on a Sunday drive in the countryside, the fresh smell of morning air, the usual screaming of the lambs and the whistling of the Postman Pat tune as the windscreen wipers would scrub off the bloody remains of their girlfriend’s torso. Nor shall they forget the little moments when the sound cars horn would be enough for a herd of blind people to jump off a building. Ah yes those were the days when hurling your best friends vehicle into a stone wall at 180mph was considered friendly communication. Not to mention the sheer force of it being done with a V8 engine with granite armor. They will never forget.

The Bad
Unfortunately time can impair our memories. Like an old photograph, it loses its colors and begins to fade. But the satisfaction of hearing the voices doesn’t change and only gets better with each round.

The Bottom Line
The people at SCOTUS will not remember such days. But for those who were in the middle, right there in the driver’s seat as they heard the squishy sounds of a lamb being ripped apart. They will never forget.