Written by: Rik
Date posted: July 22, 2022

MegaRace was a fairly terrible racer of the 90s FMV era, and for this correspondent one of the few titles that immediately springs to mind as synonymous with the words ‘bad game’. Periodically, the thought does occur that our review might have been a little on the harsh side, although I’d argue that there must be some games for which each of us may be allowed to reserve a slightly disproportionate amount of personal animosity, just as we might champion our favourites and turn a blind eye to some of their flaws. (Also, any re-evaluation would involve playing through it again, and that’s just not something I’m prepared to commit to lightly).

Taking such a position does have its downsides, however, and once the bond between myself and a bad French CD-ROM game from the 90s had been formed, it represented a commitment of sorts, with certain obligations. Like it or not, MegaRace was successful enough to spawn two sequels, both of which saw a re-release via modern digital distribution platforms, allowing my friend and long-serving FFG colleague to purchase them for me as a kind gift. I have, it seems, no excuse. (Well, I could just not play them, or write about them, I guess, but that seems far too simple).

Even those more kindly disposed towards the original would admit that it was more style than substance, and by 1996 the sheen of FMV games had largely worn off, to the extent that a similar approach for the sequel was unlikely to pass muster. Much like the swift reappraisals of fellow 90s turkey Rise of the Robots following some initially positive reviews, those wowed by the graphics and presentation in MegaRace soon became wise to its obvious shortcomings as a game, with some oddly fixated on the fact that you couldn’t turn your car around and drive the wrong way around the track (seemingly the ‘can’t jump over your opponent’ of the driving game world, although in truth a far less significant issue than Rise of the Robots’ most famous omission).

MegaRace was a fairly simple affair, which involved moving your car around a pre-rolling track, dodging and hitting symbols in a quest to catch up to a series of opponents, and either blast or smash them off the road. It looked nice (in stills) but in all other respects was inferior to ‘proper’ racing games of the time (and earlier) which actually allowed you to drive your car. And however much video hype-man Lance Boyle talked extensively about destruction and (virtual) death on the track at the hands of vicious speed gangs, your main opponent was time running out as you pursued passive blobs in the distance.

MegaRace 2 is a concession to the need to provide a little more substance. It’s a lap-based racer again, only this time you’re up against a traditional grid of opponents, whom you battle throughout the race in an attempt to finish first. On-track symbols are no more, although hazards remain, in the form of exploding barrels, while you and your opponents also have various weapons at your disposal.

There are only six tracks this time around, although you need to race on each three times, earning a place in the third round by placing fourth or higher on aggregate across the first two. That third race is then contested by those top four racers, with all hazards and weapons removed, and you need to finish first in order to progress. Money is also a factor, in that you need it to buy, repair and upgrade your vehicle with shields and weapons between races. The better you do, the more likely you are to afford what you need for the next race, and total cash earned represents your final score.

You can once again expect to see plenty of video interludes from a somewhat rejuvenated Lance Boyle, reconfigured from a sleazy middle-aged suit to a more zany character with whitened teeth, spiky hair, wacky outfits and sunglasses, and accompanied by a new female assistant, whose name he declines to remember, a tired and tasteless running joke that reflects the general nature of these scenes this time around. In the original, the sheer amount of Lance, and the somewhat repetitive nature of his comments after a while, possibly detracted from a fairly decent acting performance from Christian Erickson, and while the production budget probably dictated the slightly muted and bunker-like presentation of those scenes, it kind of added to the dystopian feeling. Here, we’re more in cheesy game show territory, and it all seems rather more pantomime and laboured. The assistant is played by moderately-famous actress Alice Evans, who does her best without having much to work with.

Out on the track, the vibe is definitely of a generic mid-90s future combat racer, with cars in the Mad Max mould instead of the sleeker efforts seen in the first game, and there’s a more genuine sense of a group of vehicles actually racing each other. The technology behind the action has moved on to some extent, although the same principles still apply: this time you have polygonal cars sitting on top of a pre-rendered road that’s always moving forward. But you can actually stop your vehicle and – yes – drive it the wrong way around the circuit, if you wish, although it involves a workaround in which the track no longer scrolls and the action is viewed from a number of static fixed camera points instead.

Even if you don’t share 90s gamers’ predilection for driving against the flow of traffic, you’ll still get plenty of opportunity to experience this feature as your car gets stuck on the scenery, is involved with a pile-up of other cars, or gets turned around by a nudge from behind. Indeed, contact with opponents, and the sides of the track, is largely unavoidable and a recurrent feature of the action regardless of any steps taken to brake or steer with due care and attention, giving each race the feel of a dodgem ride attached to a roller coaster.

There’s something of interest or merit to be found in almost all old games, regardless of how they ultimately stand up and hang together as an experience. However, no matter how much I might want to take the high road, stroke my chin and comment calmly on its place in gaming history, the fact remains that MegaRace 2 is largely dogshit. While it does a better impression of a real racing game than its predecessor, its execution is almost as poor.

Aside from the on-rails nature of the action, the sheer amount of contact with opponents makes for an extremely glitchy and unpredictable experience. Cars behind you appear to be attached to your rear bumper with a very short invisible rope, and no matter how much you might try and put some distance between you, they soon come bouncing back, hammering you tenaciously until they force their way past or slam you into the side of the track.

The most curious/infuriating element of the action is that none of the weapons seem to make any difference at all: under the circumstances, mines can be dropped literally straight beneath the front tyres of your pursuers with some consistency, but despite a visual and audible explosion this move buys you a mere second or two of respite. Front-facing weapons like missiles may also make contact with distant opponents, but with similarly minimal impact.

You do occasionally see terminally damaged AI cars lying dormant on the track, so perhaps their only function is to weaken opponents until they can no longer race: their assaults on your car are similarly ineffectual in practice, save for their impact on your shield and damage meters. But otherwise, weapons largely have a placebo effect, momentarily making you feel slightly better, despite the futility of the whole exercise. For all the difference they make, they should have just given you a horn to honk instead.

Navigation of the tracks themselves is challenging enough as it is, particularly when it comes to sharp bends that the game engine contrives to make rather difficult to negotiate, compounding the misery with a series of alternative branches which may force you to take a longer route or avoid a series of booby-trapped barrels. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which path is the optimal one, with no map available by default (although a cheat mode does enable it), but even if you work it out, your efforts to line up that path can be undermined by a swift nudge from behind or the side.

Meaningless was a word we used to describe the first game, and it applies again here. The weapons don’t work, your choice of car seems fairly arbitrary, with no workable information available either on-screen or in the manual, and you increasingly get the feeling that your own input during the race also matters little.

Despite the proliferation of YouTube videos featuring men getting angry at crap games, in my experience the worst titles take you past anger to a point of disengagement where success or failure no longer seem relevant. While you can – and do – initially get annoyed at the number of times you get boshed to one side for no good reason, it’s going to happen so often that any display of emotion ultimately proves unsustainable. It’s a lottery, in other words, and where any half-decent racer would have you slapping the keyboard for another go after a loss, here it’s more a case of rolling the dice on a particular day for 20 minutes or so and seeing if you manage to get lucky this time.

This approach took me reasonably far until a seemingly insurmountable losing streak on the penultimate course made me consider how my time might be better invested and I succumbed to cheat codes. And while the final track seemed a little less challenging to get around than some of those that preceded it, opponents were blasting me to smithereens within a couple of laps, and so I ultimately gave up.

The only thing left to do was reluctantly (and briefly) fire up the first game again, to try and get a sense of how the two compare. MegaRace has more enjoyable video sequences and is aesthetically more pleasing overall, with decent sci-fi graphics and superior music (the backing tracks in this one are a bit weird, to say the least), but I guess you’d argue that there’s slightly more game here, with the more straightforward racing action offering a brief frisson of excitement despite its ultimate descent into bumpy chaos. You know what? Let’s call it even. See you for MegaRace 3 in… ooh, let’s say at least five years or so.