Review: What to do when cartoons are over?
Sometimes a videogame just isn’t what you expect. Every once in a while, a game that you have high expectations for falls so flat that you get disillusioned with the industry. Sometimes, the game that looked to be merely enjoyable becomes one of the best games you have ever played, renewing your faith in the interactive entertainment industry. Looney Tunes Space Race is surprising in one way – how ordinary it is.
With the Dreamcast, games have been more colorful than almost any other platform. LT:SR uses the colors you would find in a standard Looney Tunes cartoon and pushes them to the limit. The graphics are almost straight out of the Chuck Jones era of history. While most people wouldn’t notice a detail like that, I would have preferred some of the older models of the characters. And characters there are. Bugs, Daffy, Yosemite Sam, Sylvester, and more make an appearance on appropriately themed rockets. For example, Bugs appears on a rocket-powered carrot and Yosemite Sam drives a custom Hover Chopper. Unfortunately, each of the characters play almost exactly the same.
The whole point of LT:SR is to take your favorite Looney Tunes character, and race him around on a themed (Mars, Asteroids, Planet ACME) course and win. To help you with achieving victory, power-ups are scattered throughout the tracks. Standard ACME fare awaits within the little boxes hovering above the tracks. Falling anvils, extendable boxing gloves, holes… you get the idea. The problem comes in the AI. Even though you use some of the power-ups and to get ahead, somehow the competition manages to catch up to you rather quickly. What starts out as strategy quickly devolves into a punching fest where coming in first place is a matter of luck at times.
The tracks themselves are great, definitely looking appropriate. One of the highlights of the game is the length of some of these courses. There have been races that have lasted several minutes.
LT:SR sports several modes of play. The basic mode is of course the single player “race”, and it’s here that courses are unlocked. Almost standard in racing games nowadays is the “time trial” and “multiplayer” modes. The game supports up to 4 players, and this is where the game truly is at it’s most fun. Turn the computer racers off, and set the number of laps to 7, and have yourself a ball. During single player mode, every once in a while, a character will “challenge” you (yup, another mode).
Winning challenges and opening tracks in single player will award you with “acme tokens” to be spent on opening other tracks where the rules are different. One race has no power ups, but anvils falling from the sky constantly. Another way to earn tokens is by beating the best time on each lap set by Marvin the Martian. Entering the Time Trial mode will allow you to do this. All in all, there are a lot of things to unlock. Thankfully, it isn’t that hard to do.
The controls of LT:SR are a bit on the sloppy side. This is the one area where the game could have used a little bit more time in the studio before being released. There are several time that I have gone over the side of the track simply because the controls in the game haven’t been fine-tuned. But this can be alleviated with some practice in the time trial mode.
