::: the electric playground :::

PlayStation II

Loony Tunes Space Race

Review

Our Score 6.5/10

Your Score 3.5/10

Review

Just about every cartoon character in creation is being thrown into racing carts to bring a bit of personality and antic fun to the videogame genre. Even the Shrek cast has shown up on the Game Boy Advance tooling down their own diminutive courses. Most of these outings are mediocre at best. The racers featuring Mario on the N64 and Crash Bandicoot on the PlayStation remain the best I have played. While Loony Tunes Space Race, a direct port of the Dreamcast version of last year, is no Mario or Crash, it does have a unique take on the genre that plays well with kids and those of us who can't get enough of the old Warner Bros. cartoons.

The usual suspects are conducting an intergalactic race. Bugs, Daffy, Yosemite Sam, Sylvester, et. al. ride through eight worlds and more than a dozen different tracks. The gameplay options are familiar. In tournament mode you race the full slate of cartoon opponents and unlock new worlds and tracks by winning. Race mode lets you go one-on-one against any character and on most tracks, while a time trial mode hones your skills unopposed. Multiplayer handles up to four live contestants in split screens. One novel mode is ACME Events, special races that get unlocked during tournament play. These contests promise to be wackier somehow than the regular races, with offbeat rules. We had trouble seeing anything especially different about them, however.

Each 'toon gets a characteristic racer. Bugs rides in a Carrot Racer, Daffy his Hover Ship, and Wile E. Coyote the ACME Rocket. These are all colorfully done, of course, but it is disappointing that we cannot see or feel much of a performance or handling difference among them. They handle competently, if not sharply. The default configuration puts acceleration on the top right shoulder button, with brake and reverse on the left. Swerving left or right is located on the respective lower shoulder buttons, and this helps characters make sharper turns in a hurry. Smaller hands will find the default configuration a tough reach, but there is an alternative that puts the accelerator down onto the main controller buttons. There is a lightly detectible lag between control movement and on-screen response, so the game does not have quite the same sharp feel as classics like Mario and Crash.

The tracks themselves are not especially challenging or inspired. Most of them careen through familiar cartoon settings. ACME Planet is a future cityscape. North Pole Star is filled with ice floes and such. There's a Wild West Quadrant and a roller-coaster-like Galactorama. The scenery is cartoonish and cute, but they all lack interactivity. There are precious few tactical shortcuts to discover or special obstacles to navigate, so that the only thing interesting about the courses is their shape. One unique challenge of Looney Tunes Space Race is that the tracks feature lots of elevated areas. Unlike most cart racers where the worst you can do is hit the wall, in this one you can go careening off the side of the track and into cartoon oblivion. In other words, your character does the usual Warner Bros. drop; the bottom of the body stretches the rest, leaving the head to follow. Yipes! When this happens, which is often as you get used to the tracks, you reappear back on the track, suffering a sizable delay as a result.

Like too many so-so cart racers, Space Race invests all of its creativity in its collection of traps and weapons that you pick up along the tracks to fling at opponents or supercharge your own vehicle. In this case, they are "gags" stored in (what else?) ACME crates. To be sure, it is fun to see so many of the classic cartoon hazards revived for this job. There is the ubiquitous cartoon one ton weight and anvil for dropping on nearby racers. There is the disintegrator ray, best remembered from the Martian's arsenal and the Kablooey rocket, which works better here than in the Road Runner flicks by homing in on the leader of the race. There are even remote control weapons. You click one of several colored remotes to bring down a piano (complete with Beethoven bust), an elephant (he bugles by way of warning) or a safe on the unsuspecting head of the front runner. Of course, there is the telescoping boxing glove, which delivers a knock down to the racer in front of you. But our favorite is the portable hole, which you lay down on the track for the next poor 'toon to trip down.

The gags are made more lively by an excellent soundtrack of character vocals and sound effects. Since the death of Mel Blanc, who rendered all of the major voices for decades of WB 'toons, many of the shorts, films, and TV series have suffered bad imitations. The voices in Space Race are remarkably good and true to the Mel Blanc tradition. Likewise, the signature WB sound effects that denote falling objects, stretching characters and the usual assortments of explosions, buzzes and whooshes, are nicely timed to the action.

One fine touch is a gallery of virtual toys, concept art, and interactive animations. You receive tokens for good performance in any of the race or tournament mode tracks and can trade them in for access to these multimedia gadgets in the gallery. This feature gives you another small incentive and reward for playing on. In cart racing, where there is little plot or any great sense of accomplishment to retain a player's interest, this is no small matter.

The split screen multiplayer mode is competent, with little slowdown and decent views of the action in all screens. Because of the nostalgia factor, the sound effects, and the ruthless ways in which you can use your gags, this is a fun party game. And since the game is so straightforward, it is a good starter racer for kids. If my house is any indication, Space Race may well get played more often than some better-made games in your library just because it is engaging to watch and to play in groups.

In fact, my ten-year-old daughter urged me to give Space Race a higher rating, because as far as she is concerned this is a great game. And in general, the whole is more than the sum of its parts in this game. If you are into the cartoon world a bit more than sharp-edged gameplay, then this title provides some solid entertainment. But, as I tried to explain to my darling daughter in vain, there are just too many mechanical problems here, and downright uninspired design, to give it the "eleven" she thinks it deserves.

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