This game is tough as nails. I love it dearly and hate it with a passion.
The cars are rendered full 3d,while the tracks are all FMV. You can, and should, use all weapons you can get your hands on to win.
Lance Boyle, the host in the game, is lovably ridiculous and his assistent is there to be ditzy. But this game will make you hate the video when you lose.
The graphics looked incredible for its time, it was miles ahead of any other racing game. I just now realized the tracks are actually FMV! The camera doesn’t follow the car but the middle of the track, and splits at any fork. Neat trick! This way most everything is pre-rendered, with all the lighting and dynamic shadows and the like. Only the cars and obstacles are rendered in realtime, on top of the video. Cool how they managed to integrate it all together seamlessly!
It blew my mind once I figured out it was FMV. The Tibet level stuck in my mind as peak game graphics for at least 5 years before I figured it out.
I remember trying to get this to run on my old 386. It ran at slide-show framerates and all I ever saw was the game over screen.
Yeah, the minimum requirements were a 486DX2 66MHZ. Which, by the time I played it, I had. By then the newest computers were already on pentium 3 though.
This game came out in 1996, the first Pentium 3 was released in 1999. In fact, the Pentium 2 wasn’t even out yet (1997), so at best you could be running this game with an expensive as all heck Pentium 200 but most people weren’t running with that kind of hardware when the game came out.
That said, yes, we weren’t rich so I was trying to scrape by on my 386SX40 as long as I could :-)
We weren’t rich either. I bought this game for 5 euros in the bargain bin somewhere after y2k
