When people ask me what kind of video games I play and I respond with “racing,” their face usually lights up and they are quick to jump to the conclusion that I’m just THE person they should invite over when they want to play a few rounds of Mario Kart.
Obviously, this couldn’t be further from the truth. As I tell my more casual-gaming friends, the type of racing games I play are on the complete opposite end of the spectrum from games like Mario Kart, requiring hours worth of practice just so you don’t spin out on the first lap. I mean, I’ll still grab the N64 controller and sheepishly apologize in advance for the beat-down they’re about to receive, but most of the time, kart racers are simply games we don’t play.
The reason for this is simple: they’re not meant for us, and buying one would be stupid. These are, by all means, kids games. Whether you’re talking about the very first game in the Mario Kart series,
Super Mario Kart, or you’re conversing with people about the brand new
Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, they are all games designed with six year olds in mind. All kart racers feature simplistic graphics, a basic weapons system, and a driving model that requires zero knowledge of actual racing skills to be competitive. If you’re sober, alone, and/or over the age of twelve, these games honestly aren’t that difficult or even fun.
So attempting to determine what the best kart racing title of all time, when the fundamentals of all kart racers are identical, is quite difficult. Fortunately, one lone Mario Kart imitator, also with a big-name license, happened to come along in late 1999 and give us a clear candidate for number one.
I was seven when I received Lego Racers as a gift from my parents shortly after release, for having good grades in school. Unlike most kids, who saved up every last penny to afford such glorious titles as Superman 64, I was fortunate enough to be born into a wealthy family, one who also monitored video game review sites. As a result, good grades would constantly land new PC racing titles in the computer room, most of which ended up being highly valuable or turned into cult classics over time.
I had breezed through Mario Kart 64 earlier that summer and the only thing that got me excited about Lego Racers was the product tie-in itself. This is a common theme of kart racers even today. You can’t just have a “regular” kart racer, it HAS to be Ben10, or M&M’s, or Sonic, or Smurfs, or… well... Lego. It’s a clever way to snag a few sales off of uninformed grandparents or build up the excitement of easily influenced children. Their thought process, as always, is “it’s ____, so it MUST be good!
But, unlike M&M’s kart racing, a game that suffers from lowly budget game woes, or Mario Kart, a game that is a subtle lesson in socialism, the original Lego Racers is actually really damn good, innovating in all the right areas and adding a level of depth that has never been matched in the kart racing genre since.
This innovation starts right with the basic gameplay.
Lego Racers had the advantage of being released AFTER Mario Kart 64, meaning it could learn from its mistakes and make slight adjustments to the physical racing action to play better from a competitive standpoint.
As a result, powersliding, a common tactic to earn boost in most kart racers, was “nerfed” as the Call of Duty crowd would say. Powerslides didn’t give you boost, they simply helped you corner much better. The end result is that you focus much more on taking corners properly. For a seven year old who was just barely starting to make the jump from Mario Kart to Need for Speed, having to adapt to this strange new tactic of slowing down for corners prepared me for the police of Rocky Pass.
Tracks were designed with varying levels of difficulty in mind, but you were never flat-footed for the entire lap. The game still relied on the “Grand Prix” format, as did most other kart racers of the day, but these tracks were actually challenging. 90-degree corners, large jumps, and a cave section full of blind downhill turns made up the first track in the entire game. While it was possible to fly through certain tracks by boosting almost the entire lap, the tracks unlocked by progressing through the game were much more advanced and the difficulty spike in track layouts was almost
too much by the end of “Grand Prix” mode.
The themes of said tracks are diverse, and as this game was made in 1999, came at a time when Lego had no problem experimenting with different sets, as they didn’t really have many third party licenses to choose from. This benefits the game greatly, as you’re never really stuck with one “theme.” You get a track on the moon, a track in the desert, a track in the jungle, a track in the arctic, a track in an alien base, and everything in between. Nothing ever feels forced, and you never see the same theme, or even roadside objects, twice. Layouts flow nicely, and every circuit has a few hidden paths that can be activated in a number of ways.
The wildcard in each kart racer are the power-ups featured, and this is where Lego Racers dared to experiment and came out on top. While most kart racers were happy with the “question mark” power up boxes scattered across the track letting the game “randomly” give you a power up based on your race position and gap from other cars, Lego Racers clearly laid out the exact kinds of power ups in front of you, and let you “upgrade” them mid race.
“Random boxes” were replaced by four different colored bricks floating on the track. Red bricks gave you a cannon ball to shoot, green bricks let you activate a small turbo boost, yellow bricks let you drop an oil slick, and blue bricks gave you a temporary shield. White bricks scattered on the side of the track let you upgrade your basic power up several times over to a more powerful one. Cannon balls eventually turned into homing missiles, oil slicks turned into booby traps that stopped cars on the spot, and quick turbo boosts could be upgraded all the way to being in control of a personal wormhole to warp ahead of the competition.
This drastically changed the racing because you could easily execute any strategy based on the scenario at hand. Instead of praying for a blue shell or an infinite turbo mushroom, you could physically pick up the exact power up you wanted, and make a late race charge for the lead. You never felt cheated out of a win because the game didn’t want to give you a Red Shell to take out the leader. If you didn’t get the turbo boost brick you wanted, it’s because someone else got there before you did.
And isn’t that what racing’s about? Skill instead of random chance?
Sure, the driving was piss easy, especially considering most of us are at the point where we can take a modern F1 car around the Ring without much trouble in significantly more complicated games, but you have to keep in mind the fundamentals being taught, and the age group this title was focused on. Lego Racers kept the kart racer formula, but injected much more racing into the core mechanics, instead of silly gimmicks that would give kids headaches.
The primary mode of play was the creatively titled (ahem) “Grand Prix” mode, which had been reworked just enough to give the game its own unique charm. Yes, it was still a collection of four points races, and yes, they all have silly names, but the uniqueness was in how it was all handled.
Each of the eight championships has a “boss” racer, a competitor that has specific traits and is usually much faster than the other four AI drivers you’re up against. Your first “boss” challenger was a pirate named Captain Redbeard, who drove what was essentially a 1930’s wagon with a giant treasure chest where the engine should be. And while the introductory video of him doing his pirate jig and trash talking in the meantime might be corny, his on-track behavior is actually quite intelligent. This guy is mighty fast and only uses the cannon ball power up.
Get it? Cause he’s a pirate…
Cliché’s aside, this sort of thing happens with all eight boss racers as you progress through “Grand Prix” mode. The tiki guy loves using shields, the vampire guy with his “Indy Car from hell” lays on the green bricks, and Johnny Thunder, the Indiana Jones of the Lego universe before Lego got the Indiana Jones license, relies on nothing but grappling hooks. It’s a fun little twist on the standard grand prix mode found in other games, and it’s nice to see the developer of a kart racer give your opponents a bit of personality, especially when it plays directly into the race strategy.
This all culminates in a one race, final showdown with “the best racer in the galaxy”, Rocket Racer, on a track in space full of ridiculous turns and an art style that makes you feel as if you truly are in a “galactic showdown.” It took me a week to beat him the first time I came across him at seven years old. By comparison, I finished Mario Kart 64 in one sitting earlier that year.
As the lack of a single race mode was a negative aspect of the main competitor, Mario Kart 64, Lego Racers gladly included a “single race” option, allowing you to run a quick session on any unlocked track at your leisure. A time trial mode also exists, challenging you to race against the ghost car of a secondary story mode character, giving a new degree of difficulty to even the simpler tracks. A battle mode was nowhere to be found. This is a racing game, after all.
And as with all kart racers, the license tie-in can either turn the game into an instant classic, or push it to the bottom of the bargain bin. In the case of Lego Racers, it helps this seemingly above average kart racer turn into something beautiful.
As you’ve probably guessed by now, Lego Racers allows you to build your own car. And this feature alone acts as a virtual fountain of youth and can turn even the most serious iRacers into giddy school children at the click of a button.
You start with building your mini-figure by mixing and matching hats, heads, torsos, and legs that you’ve unlocked while progressing through the game. Your standard racing suits and helmets give way to cowboy hats, tiki masks, and pretty much anything you can think of. Seriously, there’s just too much to pick from to adequately describe it, and once your Wizard-Huttu-Cyborg-Senna hybrid is perfect, he does a little dance and you get to name him and choose the facial expression he has on his driver’s license and in races.
The next task is actually building your car, and this is where things get complicated.
You start with any one of fifteen basic car chassis, and if you want to be a party pooper, you can either finish the job right then and there with your rolling magic carpet, or you can pick from a few preset designs. But that’s no fun, because this is goddamn Lego.
Just like real Lego, you have to adhere by the small circles that allow the bricks to snap together in the first place. Some chassis have the driver sitting at the front, others in the middle, and others at the back. Some chassis lend themselves to a traditional open wheel formula car design quite well; others are more suited to experimentation. It’s your call what you want the car to look like, and you’re given all the bricks in the world to make that happen.
The bricks you can use to design your car range from incredibly simplistic traditional bricks, to angled blocks, to car-specific pieces like wings and lights, all the way to the incredibly bizarre such as pizzas and treasure maps. You name it, you can probably put it on your car, and the amount of bricks available only increases as you progress through the Grand Prix and time trial modes.
Words alone can’t express how much genuine fun you can have while messing around in the car creator, and pictures can only scratch the surface of what can be achieved with a bit of your imagination. It’s a feature that begs to be used in today’s world of online racing games due to the sheer variety that would undoubtedly spawn from people looking to one-up each other in aerodynamics or aesthetics. Custom paint schemes on games like Forza or iRacing are one thing. Entirely custom-built cars are another. I’m not talking just body kits or rear wings like in the Need for Speed games, either. When you place the final brick on your first custom kart, it truly feels like it’s yours.
At the end of this whole creation process, you can, at any time, take your new ride out to the test track, a facility that has a simple oval track joined with a CORR-style off road section.
You may think that, since this is a kart racer with a simplified driving model, a test track is a simple gimmick to make a child feel like they truly are a professional car designer.
You are mistaken.
Place a bunch of bricks at the front of your car? It plows in the corners and suffers from understeer. Place a bunch of bricks at the rear of your car? It turns into a tail-happy mess. Add a rear wing? Rear end grip. Put that wing one brick higher? More rear end grip. Give your car two giant fighter jet vertical stabilizers, one on each side of your driver? You receive so much lateral grip that you are sent into the inside wall on even the gentlest of corners.
It’s one thing to get drunk and joke about understeer while playing Mario Kart with your friends. It’s another thing to actively try to find a way around it, while still keeping the front end of your car nothing but pizzas and a sideways jet engine.
You need that damn test track, because simple tracks like Moo Moo Farm and Koopa Beach just don’t exist in Lego Racers.
With simple kart racers being huge among little kids and drunken college students ever since the release of the original Super Mario Kart, countless imitators and duplicators have come along, hoping to get a piece of the pie. As this trend continues into 2013 with
F1 Race Stars and
Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed showing up on store shelves, hoping to lure casual gamers into the vast world of auto racing with bright colors and simplistic gameplay, I feel it’s time to say which one is the absolute champion.
Lego Racers is by far THE BEST kart racer ever made. The universal appeal of building with Lego, coupled with refined kart racer elements that balance accessibility with depth make it the perfect racing game for any little kid wanting to know a bit more about auto racing, or any sim racer looking to release their inner child after several excruciating laps trying to tame the Nordschleife.
It’s a game that desperately needs a remake in this always-online generation, because when you’re building with Lego, the possibilities are endless.
9/10
