BC Racers

Sure, Mario Kart is a great game, but after all of the bad knock-offs one wonders if it is worth it. One of the earliest knock-offs was BC Racers, a kart racers set in the world of and starring Core's Chuck Rock. Released the year after Mario Kart, BC Racers was a forerunner in the ocean of functional but uninteresting character kart games (they call them bikes in the game, but come on, it's a kart game).

The game sports a good pseudo-3D look, the other kart/bikes and tracks scale and rotate nicely if not at a 100% perfect frame rate. It doesn't necessarily slow down, but it tends to get "jumpy" from time to time which tends to take away from the decent appearance. Artistically the game is not all that different from the Chuck Rock games, which, if you are unfamiliar, has a tropical prehistoric theme. Certain levels are set in the dark and your kart gains headlights and illuminate the area just around your front end, while the rest of the track remains nearly black. It's an interesting effect, but it's a hassle to race when you can't see at all. Also, like any racing game from the era, the tracks are lined with easy to hit obstacle which bring you to an instant halt and are difficult to get off of.

The racing itself is far from attractive. My first (and biggest) complaint is how unremarkable the combat is, your only weapon is some sort of a club, or a guitar if you play as the Jimi Hendrix tribute character. It has an extremely short range, and when you hit it doesn't do much of anything. Interestingly though, you can have a second player control the weapons. Interesting, but it's not fun with such boring combat, if you want co-op kart combat that won't put you to sleep look elsewhere. Second in the line of complaints is that driving feels as if you are on ice, you slide around every corner wide, and this frequently means crashing into the crap on the sides of the courses. Digital controls compound that problem as you can't really be as precise in your maneuvering as you would like.

The complete lack of anything interesting extends to the audio, as it is extraordinarily boring. The sound effects, from clubbing to drifting around corners are just horrendously uninteresting. I find this to be a reoccurring theme on the 32X: Throw away audio for a throw away system. I'm sure the developers knew the add-on was probably doomed, but that shouldn't have stopped the team from putting forth some sort of effort. This like I said is congruent to the rest of the game, and it's this amazing mediocrity throughout the game is why this game get's an even 50. It's the very definition of a functional game that is absolutely no fun.