Star Road

Racing was one of the most popular genres on Playstation, but not all of those games necessarily focused on cars or even vehicles. Recently my interest was piqued by a game by Codemasters, who brought us the excellent Colin McRae Rally and TOCA Touring Car Championship series. The game we’re about to dive into is a spinoff of the Micro Machines series, but it doesn’t involve vehicles; instead, your character runs, like in Sonic R. Released in 2000, it was known as Micro Maniacs in its home market of Europe, but in the USA it was given the ridiculous title of FoxKids.com Micro Maniacs Racing.

Fitting the “micro” theme, you are a tiny character running around domestic themed obstacle courses. Despite this, the controls are suspiciously car-like; there is a lot of inertia and you’re often on the “brake” to get through the tighter bits.

Another reason I jumped on this game is my obsession with widescreen modes in PS1 games. This is one I haven’t seen written anywhere, but it’s official: FoxKids.com Micro Maniacs Racing supports widescreen.

Unfortunately, like every other PS1 game, they didn’t do anything about the menus so they just get stretched out, even with “widescreen” turned on.

The actual gameplay, however, looks great. It runs in high resolution 512×240 with detailed textures that you really notice with the emulator’s internal resolution cranked up.

Check out the brain texture on the last racer; the magazine is high resolution as well. This game is very playable at the standard resolution, but looks really good with it cranked up.

Some of the graphics even still feel like they hold up to a modern standard, as it seems like the “retro 32 bit” look is (re)gaining popularity.

You are racing, but the courses are less “race track” and more “obstacle course”. There’s even a jump button, also like Sonic R (or Mario Kart, if you like).

Unfortunately, that’s where it falls apart for me. I think I could deal with the physics on their own; you slide around like you’re wearing socks on a freshly polished hardwood floor yet have F1 stopping power when you press the “brake”. Despite the trickiness the controls do feel consistent, like you could get dialed in with practice; as expected from Codemasters. However, not only are the tracks deliberately tricky with obstacles, narrow platforms, and sharp turns, the fixed-angle camera means that often you can’t see where you’re going.

Memorizing the track is part of any racing game, of course. But the penalties here are steep: you can fly off the table, or out of this gutter, if you simply understeer. Or get bumped. Oh yeah that’s right, there are also power-ups and you can shoot someone or push them off the track. It’s like Wipeout but the tracks have no walls and you have to wait for Lakitu from Mario Kart to pick you up when you fly off.

Luckily I have save states in the emulator, because they only offer you a limited amount of “lives” (retries). On a real console, this game requires you to get dialed into every track before you tackle the story mode, which I also find annoying.

But that was the gaming sensibility back then; having something take time to master meant you spent more time with it, giving more value. I never really liked it back then, and it makes no sense in a modern context. Limiting you to four lives to complete eight races of each character’s story mode might seem reasonable if you’re thinking about Mario Kart or Gran Turismo, but this game has so many insta-death moments everywhere that can destroy your race. And that’s after you’ve already memorized and mastered the tricky obstacle-course layouts.

It’s way too easy to fall down the hole right in the middle of this bench. Imagine if Lakitu snagged you every time you went off the edge of the road, or right down the middle of it!

The level designs make smile, particularly the garage one. And there are actually quite a few tracks in this game too. Unfortunately, when the highly technical obstacle course track layout needs to be navigated by a character that feels like a greasy hippo on ice, and any failure results in a huge penalty, it starts to become frustrating.

Amazingly, this game supports up to eight people in multiplayer on one screen. There is a large learning curve on both the tracks and character controls; I wonder if this would make it too frustrating, or if in the absence of computer-controlled characters the chaos would make it hilarious. How many people actually used the 8-player function? I would love to go back in time to that super 2000 party. I hope they had a widescreen TV!

One of my favorite things in gaming is a single player campaign in a racing game. I love to see an actual story, like in R: Racing Evolution or Initial D, but I’ll settle for a career mode too. FoxKids.com Micro Maniacs Racing has an odd combination of both. There’s some story at the beginning and a “Memoirs” menu where you can read some lore, but when you start “Challenge” mode you’re faced with an eight stage gauntlet of ever-increasing difficulty where you get to choose between four tracks at each level, and there’s zero exposition or seemingly any character-related development. However, when you complete all that, you get a story ending!

That’s us, “Vortex” just cruising in our space ship with oddly high controls.

Pretty big ship for just one person.

Alright, I have to laugh from the absurdity of it all. It does seem like the kids-show humor of that time. If you think kids’ humor is dumb now, I hope you feel better that a punchline 25 years ago was “and she flew into a black hole derp lol”.

There are a few other things to do, but even that short time in the main game kinda burned me out. I was watching WRC Rally Paraguay last weekend and one of the stages was so brutal with sharp compressions that Thierry Neuville commented after the stage something about how that stage is not even driving, you are just trying to avoid damage. That’s how I feel about playing FoxKids.com Micro Maniacs Racing: you never get into a flow with any of the tracks because of their obstacle course nature; you want to go fast but you spend more time trying not to die. With the variety of tracks and challenging yet consistent gameplay, I can see how this game could have its fans, but I’m not one of them. Ideally, I want a game with natural-feeling controls and fast, flowing tracks. In the next PS1 article, I’ll go over a game that set the benchmark by doing exactly that.