Wacky Races (2000) - MobyGames (2024)

The Good
Years ago, my father brought home a Wacky Races game for the PC. I used to watch the cartoon as a child so I thought it'd be cool to have a game for it. When I tried it however, I found it to be almost unplayable: Very bugged, and just not fun. It was a complete disappointment. So when my parents bought me a Playstation 2 one of the first games I had for it was this one. At first I thought "Oh no not a PS2 port of that lame computer game". Fortunately I was wrong, as this has nothing to do with the computer game. In fact, AFAIK this version of the game is pretty much the same as the Dreamcast version.

In this game you can revive the old Wacky Races. You can play as all the characters of the cartoon. Each character has its own set of advantages/attacks and becomes more powerful once you finish the Adventure mode. There are many types of battles here. From the traditional race (composed of laps, with the exception of very few maps), from special Deathmatch maps where your objective is to take out your adversaries instead of winning a race. There are also other kind of gamemodes, such as the "Gold Muttley" challenge or the Dick Dastaldly challenge.

All the maps are well done and it is especially fun to play them with friends. In a way this game reminds me of Crash Team Racing as the gameplay mechanics are pretty similar (There are weapons here as well). As I already mentioned the game supports up to 4 players races/battles which manage to be much more fun than playing against the AI which at times may become boring (even though it's pretty well done).

The Good
1. Everything about this game puts you directly in the cartoon, from the sounds to the characters to the weapons to the karts. This was a kart-racer designed for both cartoon fans and video karting fans. (Hence, I found it enjoyable on both counts.)

2a. The token system, wherein the use of a weapon is dictated by how many tokens you have and how many tokens each weapon costs to use, is a really neat way of making the game more fun. In many karters, the weapons are randomized--you run into a box or over a panel and wait to see what the CPU sticks you with. In Wacky Races, so long as you collect tokens from around the track, you can use whatever you like. If you like Penelope's hair dryer boost and nothing else, you can use that boost all the time and ignore everything else. This makes it fun for people who are more into the cartoon than the video game--they can play along to collect tokens and spend 'em on the weapons that give the biggest weapons.

2b. The other cool feature about the token system is that the tokens are recycled: when you use a weapon and spend tokens, instead of those tokens disappearing, your spent tokens are tossed back onto the track. The token system is cool all around, and I'm really surprised it hasn't caught on in other karting series.

1. I know this ties in with #1, but the attention to detail in the maps, karts, weapons, and characters is so freakin' cool. It's fun just to replay races and listen to the SFX.

2. Arkansas Chugga-Bug

3. Muttley's laugh.

   The Bad
   1. The previous reviewer's comment about the difficulty is warranted. The game asks a lot of the player to unlock features that probably should have been available from the get-go. One of the "Boss Races" to beat Dastardly is damn-near impossible--it took me a full three hours of attempts to beat him one night, and as somebody who really enjoys karters and has gotten good at them, I was effin' PO'ed. So the game can be ridiculously frustrating in brief, very limited moments.

5. This point is the cold side to the hot side from what I liked about the token system: if you happen to get way out front, one of the drawbacks of the token system is that it leaves GOBS of spent tokens on the track for the kart way in front. The pack spends them beating up on each other, and when you've got a half-lap lead and come back to their battlefield, you can fill up on tokens and burst to increase your lead. It's not fair, really.

4a. The announcer got old. I turned him off pretty early into the game. This is a lame criticism, as you can turn him off. Just pointing it out.

I played the hell out of it, and I had lots of other supposed DC classics to waste my gaming time on. Wacky Races was in my top 3 most played games along with Jet Grind Radio and Power Stone 2. Despite my gripes about the relative ease of karting in this game, I just couldn't stop going back to it because, like JGR and PS2, it's unadulterated FUN.