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Looney Tunes: Space Race review

Game: Looney Tunes: Space Race
Platform: Dreamcast
Genre: Racing
Developer: Infogrames

Staff review by Jason Venter

April 30, 2005

Bugs Bunny flew by me in a blur as his vehicle belched flame. I smiled quickly and pressed the ‘A’ button. Not much later, on a crazy corner with no railing, I flew past the unfortunate rabbit. He was pinned beneath an anvil. It felt good, real good. The unfortunate thing about Looney Tunes Space Race, the Infogrames-developed racer for the Dreamcast, is that such highs are almost always ruined by painful retribution.

The idea behind the game is simple: you are one of eight cartoon mascots (two of which you must unlock by playing through the whole game) determined to make it past the checkered flag in first place and in one piece. It doesn’t matter if you almost come in second, even if there’s the tiniest fraction of a second holding you from victory. There’s the first place finisher, and then there are the losers who don’t count.

To avoid being that loser, you must master the fine art of dropping elephants, pianos and other weights on your opponents, pummeling them with a boxing glove, zapping them with electricity, dropping them down holes and so forth. At first, this is quite exciting. The animation is good and it’s fun to hear your racer’s exultant shouts as he zips past his grumbling victims. Plus, there’s something about the sight of a falling piano that’s just plain funny. The problems only start when you get sick of such gags, which you will find happens rather early in the proceedings.

Then you suddenly realize that no amount of racing skill will save you if you aren’t ready to rely on those pesky gags. Race like a champion and you’ll still finish short of the gold just because everyone else is relying on cheap tricks. Suppose, for example, that you take the lead. Let’s even say your driving skills are such that you’ve almost lapped one of your opponents. Guess what? It doesn’t matter! Out of nowhere, you hear a sound like a falling jet plane and in an instant, you’re squashed under a pink elephant. Within seconds, that enormous lead you had trickles away. If somehow it doesn’t, odds are you’ll be seeing another colossal mammal in the very near future.

Now, there are ways to avoid such setbacks, but they are plagued with new problems of their own. Upon hearing the bombing jet, you might choose to use a speed booster. Congratulations, you’ve avoided that hazard. But what about the corner you’re suddenly headed toward at breakneck speed? Enjoy your fall and watch the seconds tick by. Instead of the speed booster (which isn’t even available until you’ve grabbed five oil cans from the track), it’s better to use the lucky clover. The problem is, you only get these once in a blue moon. More frequently, you get bombs or boxing gloves or something similarly lackluster. Even if you get the clover early on, do you hold onto it for a moment of need and watch everyone pass by you with gags of their own, or do you quickly use it and hope you grab another from the next set of item boxes?

Some would call this strategy, but it really isn’t. The game depends too much on those gag items for its own good. There are moments where things get downright frantic and every racer seems to be throwing down anvils and storm clouds like they’re going out of style. Racing jets are piling up everywhere and flying off the edge, and really it’s either a total blast (because you’re surviving) or it’s frustrating (because you’re not). It seems there are no in-betweens.

Fortunately, or perhaps not, there’s not a lot of length to the game. There are a total of twelve tracks. These are divided by theme, and the number of honestly unique racing venues is closer to around six. Because the developers knew that no one in his right mind would care to race through such a small number of locales, they divided things up and then set up the game so that to see everything, you’ll have to play through the same environments again, and again… and again.

Besides the default racing mode, which just lets you run through the twelve tracks until you’ve placed first on each of them, there are the occasional challenges that pop up. These may place small variations on things, or perhaps they won’t. One example is a stage where you must survive as an endless stream of anvils rains from the sky. And if you survive that, there’s the occasional piano (which you can’t avoid). Does that sound like you’re idea of fun? There’s also the time trial mode, where you race without the distraction of opponents or gags, just hoping you can beat the lap record. This is actually a nice change of pace if you’re sick of all the portable holes and rocket blasts. It’s nice to do that for a break from the tedium.

So if the game can be so tedious, why even play it? Well, it’s like I said. There are those moments where you can genuinely enjoy yourself as you create chaos and squeak over the finish line ahead of your opponents. Even better, you can play the game with a friend or three in split-screen mode. If you thought things were frantic alone, try it with another human sitting on the couch beside you. Though you can unlock every character, track and bit of gallery artwork inside of six hours in the single-player mode, playing with a friend extends the disc’s time spinning in your Dreamcast. In the end, that’s enough to recommend the game to anyone who wants a slightly different experience for Sega’s ill-fated system. Don’t go in expecting Mario Kart and you’ll like it just fine.

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