18th January 2009, 1:27 AM
Nintendo 64
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Top Gear Overdrive
Great game! Exceptional graphics for the system, with high resolution support, fantastic, highly detailed textures, lots of filters, and more, an amazing sense of speed (you really do feel like you're going really fast in the later cars!), pretty good, interesting, and varied track designs, great arcade-style skiddy car control where you always feel like despite how you skid everywhere when controlled right you have perfect control over where the car goes, fun low-gravity physics with the cars' Rush-like ability to fly into the air with the slightest bump and tracks full of shortcuts (they are admittedly much tamer in design than Rush shortcuts, but still, finding and using the shortcuts is a lot of fun!), a nice variety of cars to unlock as you progress, only five main tracks but with a final semi-secret track and mirror modes for the first five tracks to mix things up as you go through, music with vocal audio (six tracks, all with full vocal audio)... great stuff! It even has EEPROM-based on-cart saving, which is awesome for a third-party N64 game! The other three N64 Top Gear games all require controller paks to save, but not this one... :)
Also, despite the very nice graphics, high resolution (expansion pak required, this was one of the first games to support it), and many layers of filters and graphical effects, the framerate is absolutely rock-solid. Indeed, for anyone who says that the N64 can't do racing games that both have great, fairly detailed graphics and a great framerate, this is a great game to show. I mean, the graphics aren't the equal of, say Rush 2049, if just because the detail, size, and scale of the environments is a lot smaller, but the framerate is high and absolutely stable at all times, and the environments more than nice enough looking to keep you interested. The game also has four player split-screen play... WITH COMPUTERS! Yes, this is one of the only racing games on the N64 which has more than four vehicles in the 3 or 4 player mode -- in fact, you have eight cars in 2, 3, or 4 player mode. The only thing lost in 3 or 4 player mode versus 2 is the minimap (there is none in 3/4 player mode), along with the loss of music in all multiplayer modes (as I say later). Single player does have 12 cars so it's not the same number as single player, but it's still great for the system, that's for sure. In comparison Wipeout 64 does have the full 16 cars in 2-player mode, but it goes down to 4 vehicles with removed track-side art for 3/4 player mode.
It's not one of the hardest games around, and indeed when I got back to playing it today I finished more than half of the game in one day, but I played it quite a bit to get that far and found the difficulty level to be, overall, just about right -- challenging enough to force me to keep trying to do better and improve myself, but not so hard as to really be frustrating. I'd say they balanced it perfectly; a Hard mode might be nice, but if there was only going to be one difficulty, they got it right. The game is a catch-up style racing game, where you are the only person who starts at the line while everyone else starts down the track from you (by the last season, the front few racers start at least halfway around the track... you can tell, every car is marked by a dot on the map. :)), but catching up and passing everyone is fun, so this isn't a problem, it's just a design decision. The game and track design encourages you to keep trying to race your best on each track and find the best path on the course, and it's a lot of fun.
Sure, the music is not-too-interesting-for-me rock, but still, the effort is notable on a system with very few games with music with songs with vocals. The only other significant issues are that the game doesn't save any best times, only best finish positions in the various races, there is no music in multiplayer mode (too bad, considering the effort put in to that element), that there is only the championship season and single-race modes and no other modes or options (no variety of game modes), and that the collision isn't perfect and sometimes you will fall through the border between a floor and wall or reset onto the main track from the middle of a shortcut you just entered (a really, really annoying thing that in later seasons often necessitates a you to restart the race for no fault of your own, if you want to win)... this is annoying, but not enough to ruin the game. Overall it's a very, very good arcade-style racing game with some very impressive graphics and gameplay that's just as good. Aside from these few problems, this game has very few issues, and a lot of good things going for it. Recommended!
--
Top Gear Overdrive
Great game! Exceptional graphics for the system, with high resolution support, fantastic, highly detailed textures, lots of filters, and more, an amazing sense of speed (you really do feel like you're going really fast in the later cars!), pretty good, interesting, and varied track designs, great arcade-style skiddy car control where you always feel like despite how you skid everywhere when controlled right you have perfect control over where the car goes, fun low-gravity physics with the cars' Rush-like ability to fly into the air with the slightest bump and tracks full of shortcuts (they are admittedly much tamer in design than Rush shortcuts, but still, finding and using the shortcuts is a lot of fun!), a nice variety of cars to unlock as you progress, only five main tracks but with a final semi-secret track and mirror modes for the first five tracks to mix things up as you go through, music with vocal audio (six tracks, all with full vocal audio)... great stuff! It even has EEPROM-based on-cart saving, which is awesome for a third-party N64 game! The other three N64 Top Gear games all require controller paks to save, but not this one... :)
Also, despite the very nice graphics, high resolution (expansion pak required, this was one of the first games to support it), and many layers of filters and graphical effects, the framerate is absolutely rock-solid. Indeed, for anyone who says that the N64 can't do racing games that both have great, fairly detailed graphics and a great framerate, this is a great game to show. I mean, the graphics aren't the equal of, say Rush 2049, if just because the detail, size, and scale of the environments is a lot smaller, but the framerate is high and absolutely stable at all times, and the environments more than nice enough looking to keep you interested. The game also has four player split-screen play... WITH COMPUTERS! Yes, this is one of the only racing games on the N64 which has more than four vehicles in the 3 or 4 player mode -- in fact, you have eight cars in 2, 3, or 4 player mode. The only thing lost in 3 or 4 player mode versus 2 is the minimap (there is none in 3/4 player mode), along with the loss of music in all multiplayer modes (as I say later). Single player does have 12 cars so it's not the same number as single player, but it's still great for the system, that's for sure. In comparison Wipeout 64 does have the full 16 cars in 2-player mode, but it goes down to 4 vehicles with removed track-side art for 3/4 player mode.
It's not one of the hardest games around, and indeed when I got back to playing it today I finished more than half of the game in one day, but I played it quite a bit to get that far and found the difficulty level to be, overall, just about right -- challenging enough to force me to keep trying to do better and improve myself, but not so hard as to really be frustrating. I'd say they balanced it perfectly; a Hard mode might be nice, but if there was only going to be one difficulty, they got it right. The game is a catch-up style racing game, where you are the only person who starts at the line while everyone else starts down the track from you (by the last season, the front few racers start at least halfway around the track... you can tell, every car is marked by a dot on the map. :)), but catching up and passing everyone is fun, so this isn't a problem, it's just a design decision. The game and track design encourages you to keep trying to race your best on each track and find the best path on the course, and it's a lot of fun.
Sure, the music is not-too-interesting-for-me rock, but still, the effort is notable on a system with very few games with music with songs with vocals. The only other significant issues are that the game doesn't save any best times, only best finish positions in the various races, there is no music in multiplayer mode (too bad, considering the effort put in to that element), that there is only the championship season and single-race modes and no other modes or options (no variety of game modes), and that the collision isn't perfect and sometimes you will fall through the border between a floor and wall or reset onto the main track from the middle of a shortcut you just entered (a really, really annoying thing that in later seasons often necessitates a you to restart the race for no fault of your own, if you want to win)... this is annoying, but not enough to ruin the game. Overall it's a very, very good arcade-style racing game with some very impressive graphics and gameplay that's just as good. Aside from these few problems, this game has very few issues, and a lot of good things going for it. Recommended!
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