Mickey’s Speedway USA

THE BAD:
The lifespan, the sound, the 'originality', the weapons

SUMMARY:
When I first heard about Mickeys speedway USA, I was overjoyed, because as far as I could tell it looked like an adequate sequel to the excellent Diddy Kong racing. And up to a certain point, it is. The graphics are nothing short of brilliant, with the usual array of dark greens of swamps and sunset oranges of, well, sunsets. And the game play is pretty good too. But from there on, everything starts to fall apart.

To start with, it all reeks of Mario Kart, from the puny arsenal of weapons to Louie duck holding a traffic light in his helicopter thing in the pre-race countdown, I think the creativity department was on holiday. For instance, on the Philadelphia level, there are falling crates, just like the Thwomps on Bowsers Castle. And the White houses red-carpeted corridors are no match for those, also in Bowsers Castle. Even the battle mode didnt have an ounce of originality in it, you have three Mickey-shaped balloons, and when you get shot, you lose one. It even borrows from Perfect Dark, having the probe-like thingy on the options menu. Come on, anyone can do better than that.

Just because it is a rip-off of Mario Kart, doesnt mean it isnt good. I think that most of that creativity went into the menu. It revolves around Ludwig von Drakes lab, and is fabulous. You select an option, by moving the camera around a sickeningly bright and colourful stack of blocks, and then once you have, the camera moves somewhere else to do what youve chosen. If you select Practice, before entering it, you get to play a neat little slot car game, and when you select options, the camera glides over to Ludwigs computer.

The game is split up into five tournaments, each getting gradually trickier, until you get to the final near impossible track. Then, in each tournament there are Amateur, Intermediate and Professional modes, in which the cars get faster the harder the mode. Then there is an unlockable mirror mode, which almost doubles the track value. But despite having twenty tournaments to complete, the perfect handling, and usually easy track design means that within a day youll have most of the trophies. But this also means that the CPU opponents are also good, though beatable, and one slip-up almost guarantees a loss.

The sound is what lets the game down most, though. The petty whine of the car is bad enough, but add in music which only changes in pitch throughout the tracks means youll have it on mute for most of the time. The characters voices are OK, but its all too friendly, with characters apologizing for shooting someone else. Which brings me to another fault.

The plot is that weasels have dog-napped Pluto, and you have to race around the US trying to catch them. But instead of racing against the weasels, you have to race against your friends. That means, if this happened in real life, they could let each other win. But for now lets set aside the story and continue.

Oh, and before I forget, there is one major cheating fault, that enables you to finish the game easily. The unlimited retries cheat. It lets you play and re-play individual tracks in tournaments without having to re-do the whole tournament, and whats more, it counts as a normal way. Sneaky no?

Despite all these grumbles, Rare have still achieved what other developers would consider a hit, and even though there is little replay value, the multiplayer racing will still be popular for a long time after you have finished the game. So, have Rare lived up to their name? Yes and No. It is a shame the game had to be Disney, but even so, they have made another fun game which, for a Disney game, deserves the popularity it will probably get.