[LGR Theme]
[fizz, sip]
Aahhh!
Carmageddon is one of those unique games that you just have to wonder
how it was created in the first place.
"Racing for the chemically imbalanced,"
states the rather graphic box art,
right under its blood-splattered logo.
Even Postal 2 didn't have a cover this blatant.
This is the uncensored American release here.
For those of you that may not have gotten the idea yet,
Carmageddon is about racing cars
while causing all sorts of mayhem
in a somewhat armageddon-like fashion.
And holy crap, this game is fun!
Carmageddon is not to be confused
with the very much horrible Carmageddon 64.
This one is amazing
and it was made by SCI,
who later released games under the Eidos brand
and is now owned by Square Enix.
To get a general idea of the game's feel,
think about a mashup of demolition derbies
and movies like Mad Max and Death Race 2000.
And actually, that's more accurate than you might think at first.
The game started off as a demolition racing game concept.
The idea was scrapped and it was reworked
once they got a license to the movie Mad Max.
But that license fell through and instead was replaced
with a license to the sequel to the movie Death Race 2000,
Death Race 2020.
But that movie was canned,
so that license fell apart, too.
Eventually they just said,
"Let's get the freaking game done,"
and they released it as Carmageddon.
You start out as one of two drivers,
Mad Mike or Die Anna,
with Mike having a car
mainly made for destroying other cars,
and Anna with a car that's better for killing people.
A little more lightweight.
Yeah, that is the main draw of the game:
being able to slaughter pedestrians for points,
just like the movie Death Race 2000.
In fact, Mad Mike's–
not to be confused with Mad Max's– car
is based on the alligator car
from the movie Death Race 2000.
So you can pick either of these two players.
Each car is good for certain things, but it really doesn't matter too much.
They're really, really similar as far as specs.
The career mode consists of 36 races
and a couple of dozen vehicles that can be unlocked.
You can also upgrade your cars up to five levels,
and six after you beat the game,
with money that you earn for killing people and killing your opponents.
So you're really free to play how you want to,
no matter what car you pick.
And I mean that to the fullest.
You
can play
Carmageddon
any way you can think to.
Each race is completed in one of three ways:
by destroying your opponents demolition derby-style,
by killing all of the pedestrians,
or by completing the race circuit.
Nobody ever really completes the actual racing circuits
because they're for pansies.
So personally, I'd go for blowing up my opponents,
as there are sometimes up to 700 pedestrians to kill.
So that could take forever.
And the racing takes place in rather large open world areas.
Finding all these pedestrians can be hard to do without a power-up.
Really, a nice mix of things is the way to go.
Mow over a few dozen people and animals, or even better,
run over the people AND your opponents in one felled swoop.
Preferably by electrocuting them.
And then landing on them from a high jump
and then running back over their carcass with your tires,
spreading their guts all over the place,
mixing it with the burning oil of your dead rivals.
Laughing like a maniac
all along the way!
[maniacal laugh]
Of course, you've got to save a replay of that if it happens,
post it on YouTube, 'cause that would be awesome.
And no, I am not a psycho.
This game...
just... does horrible things.
And you know what? That's why I love Carmageddon so much.
It gives you such an intense feeling of freedom
for playing how YOU want to.
No matter how horrific it is,
and usually the MORE horrific it is, the better.
You get points in cash for no matter what you do,
so you never feel like you're wasting your time, really.
It's just that some things you do are gonna be a little more satisfying
to your style than other things.
You could go as crazy as you want.
And yes, your car will take serious damage,
but as long as you have some credits to repair your car,
you can do so on the spot.
If you flip over, you can reset your car for 1,000 credits.
I mean, I never feel like I'm being punished playing Carmageddon.
I always come away from the game feeling satisfied.
Now there are three difficulty modes
and the hardest difficulty is really challenging.
But if you get bored of simply annihilating everyone,
it's a good way to mix things up.
And if you like a particular race a whole lot,
you can back and play it over as many times as you like,
still earning more cash and upgrades along the way.
It's the little things like this that are actually HUGE things missing
from racing games today,
which is the freedom to follow your own disturbing path
and still have loads of fun making actual,
discernible game progress.
Sure, the graphics are pretty dated,
but it doesn't make it any less fun.
And when you use the high-res mode or 3dfx patch,
it's certainly more than playable.
The soundtrack is also very enjoyable and I think very appropriate,
mostly by Fear Factory, which was sort of a staple
of action-racing games in the late '90s.
The sounds are all appropriately nasty too,
with screams and crunchy collisions.
One or two of them are kind of annoying,
like your little guy up at the top of the screen,
shouting obscenities and random things here and there.
You can turn him off, thankfully.
Really annoying, though, are the cops and the sound they make.
That siren just never stops for the last half of the game.
So that gets old.
The opponent artificial intelligence is also... very well done,
with each driver having a personal style
that you'll have to learn in order to defeat them.
Each area you race in feels unique in its own way,
though most of them are just variations on previous races.
There's only about five or six different track types.
But each one feels different enough.
You'll have some that are dark,
some are in the daytime,
some where it's gonna be foggy or...
it just looks different enough where it to make it feel like you're racing somewhere else.
And the controls... wow.
Once you get used to the very solid physics,
it is a joy to drive
each of the cars.
Every car feels extremely different
and very appropriate to its shape and mass.
And it's felt in every bump, jump and head-on collision.
And with this much variation to the cars, as well as the tracks themselves,
it makes what is already a lot of gameplay feel like even more.
And if that's still not enough,
there's an expansion, the Splat Pack,
which adds a whole lot more cars and tracks
and a few tweaks along the way.
And I could go on with more details, but honestly I really don't care to.
Because Carmageddon is really that good.
No other DOS racing game
even comes close to this as far as I'm concerned,
as far as raw fun factor.
Now I do still like and prefer the sequel,
Carmageddon II: Carpocalypse Now.
It's pretty much the exact same game, but with even more to do.
There's something more intangibly raw-feeling about the original game.
It's kind of like Doom in that respect.
Sure, there are more advanced games in the genre,
but this DOS classic
is just perfect the way it is.
And the end result
is a timeless feeling that you'll get
with no other DOS racing game, period.