Almost every race sees you either sitting in last place, completely unable to attack any of your opponents due to the short range of the weapons you’re given, or you’re constantly in the lead, picking up a load of items that are basically useless because your opponents are too far behind to attack you anyway. You can tell they’ve gone for a similar system – performing badly gets you good weapons, and vice-versa. Crazy Frog Racer 2 takes this idea and messes it up completely. It’s designed so that all the players stay close together, leading to much more interesting races. It gets more complicated when you bare in mind that skilled use of the banana skin allows a player to block incoming attacks, but you get the idea. It acts as an automatically-adjusting handicap, so that inexperienced players can hold their own against veterans. If you want to impress your friends, you can point out that this is called a negative feedback system. Staying in first place for any length of time, on the other hand, will get you much less impressive toys to play with (a banana skin, for example). In Mario Kart, you pick up items on the track, and are given ‘better’ items (say, a lightning bolt that shrinks all your opponents) if you appear to be losing. Still, I’d better back it up with a few examples. If there was any justice in the world, that’d be the press quote on the box. That’s right – you’re thinking of Crazy Frog Racer 2. Now, imagine a racing game starring a cast of entirely charmless characters that takes all the good ideas from Mario Kart, misunderstands them entirely, then tries to re-create them. It’s a solid racing game with an incredibly well-balanced weapons system (so well-balanced, in fact, that it merits a battle mode that’s set apart from the regular races). Everyone and their mother has played Mario Kart, and there’s a good reason for that – it’s fantastic in just about all of its incarnations. Still, is the game any good? D’you want the long answer, or the short one? Considering the target audience, they might as well have gone all the way and just written the whole thing in txt spk instead. Who the hell was paid to proof-read this crap? I’ll tell you: no-one bloody was. You can use it for example when your about to win”. And don’t forget that “The Shied will protect you for a short while. A couple of pages on, you’re told that you can “try to beat your records in the time trails”. Yes, apparently the booklet’s aim of instructing the player is secondary to the objective of selling you the latest Crazy Frog album. Right after the obligatory health warnings and stuff on the inside front cover, you’re presented with “ALSO AVAILABLE: CRAZY FROG ‘MORE CRAZY HITS’ – THE ALBUM (CD + BONUS DVD)”. Point is, I want it to be made clear that I approached Crazy Frog Racer 2 with an open mind, despite the general awfulness that apparently surrounds its main character, and the fact that it’s basically aimed at kids.Ī quick look through the instruction booklet set a few alarm bells ringing, though. Well, not so much ‘missed out on’, as ‘successfully avoided’ – largely because you have to be an arsehole to actually watch MTV for long enough that you’ll see a Jamster advert (mind you, last time I checked, that only took about twenty seconds). The game just looks and feels really ugly.Y’know, I actually missed out on the whole Crazy Frog thing. Pretty much every track has big drops that damage you which you cannot avoid but health items are often pretty sparse or so small that you can't even see them through the speedy mess while desperately trying to stay on track. There is also this damage system where you get slower the more damage you take but it's balanced so badly that it's just annoying. It all just adds to the confusion and overall noise. I never really have the feeling what I'm using here is very effective. None of them feel very satisfying or consistent either. Since the characters move rather quickly and are mostly pretty small it gets really easy to lose sight over things.Ī lot of the items are shallow copies of what most people are familiar with from Mario Kart games and some I could never figure out what they were actually supposed to do. It's easy to fall off and you're gonna be bouncing against walls a lot. A lot of the tracks is really narrow and very winding. The track designs are complete dogshit and the wonky controls make it a chore to get through them. Crazy Frog Arcade Racer is probably the most uncomfortable experience I had with a racing game.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |