Alcohol-fueled rant

Rumble Racing is a great game. Sure, it could be better, I even have a long list of improvements it could have done to it. But for what it is, it's a great game. Let's break it down and examine it a little more closely.

Being an arcade-style racer with powerups, you expect some crazy action, and indeed it does deliver. All 8 cars can be on screen jousting for position and using powerups and the game doesn't even think about slowing from a solid 60 frames per second. Sure, it was a launch title and doesn't really use the full power of the PS2, but Ridge Racer V was also a launch title and has slowdown, with no powerups. Think about that for a bit.

Those powerups themselves, let's compare them to other, similar games, for instance, Mario Kart. Each competitor in Mario Kart has their own special unique powerup that is usually rare but powerful. In addition, there is the blatantly overpowered Blue Shell, which seeks out the leader and blows them up, with an area of effect that can get a close-by second place. These can be dodged, but it is a dark and arcane magic. Other than that, Mario Kart's powerups are somewhat balanced.

Rumble Racing has no definitive anti-leader powerup. If you've played the game you may be screaming "Tornado! Tornado!" at me, but honestly, the Tornado is too rare (and only guaranteed much too late in the race) to make a difference. If you're lucky, it'll take a shortcut and you'll go up from 8th to 5th or so. It's not the black and white "if you launch it in a shortcut, it takes all shortcuts, if you launch it outside of a shortcut, it doesn't take shortcuts" difference that's clearly noticable in Rumble Racing's predecessor, NASCAR Rumble. The Tornado was much more prevalent in NASCAR Rumble than in Rumble Racing, mainly because computers could get them, and that they weren't any more rare than any other powerup and not running order-restricted. That and they would go around the track for several laps causing mayhem. I agree that the Tornado powerup needed to be rarer and restricted to the lower positions, making it human player-only was nice but not really needed, but overall it's too rare.

Comparing rarity, the lower positions in Mario Kart get almost nothing but mushrooms (very momentary speed boosts, only really useful for cutting across grass or other sections of the track that would slow you down), lightning (slows everyone else when used), and blue shells. To contrast, in the lead, you literally get nothing but bananas and green shells. A working strategy in Mario Kart involves lingering back for most of the race and pouncing on the lead on the last lap. because if you do too well you won't be able to win. To me, that removes any semblance of fun there might be, having to artificially limit my show of skill in order to run a winning tactic. A proper winning tactic should involve nothing but skill.

I've said before that Rumble Racing could have been made harder if the AI cars would launch powerups forwards instead of only dropping them. In Mario Kart, they do this gratuitously, and the result is clear that it's a lot harder to stay in first. While I don't agree with the anti-1st place sentiment that the Mario Kart games have, there's a middle ground in AI and powerup balance between Rumble Racing and Mario Kart that would result in the perfect game.

Let's shift gears slightly and look at a different game, Wipeout. I've only really played the first PSP one, so that's what my impression of the game is based on. Wipeout's physics are governed by an extremely tight rubber band and a very cruel dictator. It makes no sense to have the "time hitting the accelerator correctly at the start of a race to get a speed boost" feature when one second after that speed boost blows you by the field, the rubber band kicks in and the field shoots past you. Furthermore, if you even so much as graze the wall, or even worse, are bumped into it by a computer, your speed is dropped tremendously. The AI seems to know about this and use it to its own advantage, which is very annoying, aggrivating, and disturbing. Wipeout does however carry the distinction of being the only game in this rant other than Rumble Racing where midair stunts can result in speed boosts.

There's also a similar series of games featuring Crash Bandicoot. I've played a few of them. It seemed way too much like a Mario Kart ripoff.

I've played Jak X Combat Racing for about the period of a three day rental, and didn't really like it.

The only other passable game that offers a gameplay experience remotely similar to Rumble Racing is its aforementioned predecessor, NASCAR Rumble. I know that EA probably sees no profit in making Rumble Racing 2, but it would please me greatly if they did so. The storage space afforded to games by the current generation of consoles means that they could put in a shitton of content. They could bring back NASCAR Rumble's Storm powerup that was removed in Rumble Racing, they could bring back all of the tracks from NASCAR Rumble and Rumble Racing (even the ones from NASCAR Rumble that Rumble Racing re-did), and give us more tracks in a similar vein to the previous ones. Maybe even have tracks that can be raced in reverse, just to mix things up. Cars could be customizable, there could be support for more players in multiplayer (Both of the Rumble games only let two humans play at once, even though both systems supported multitaps and the latter supported online play), even online multiplayer with server-side rankings and the whole lot.

It could be awesome. But instead, what do we get? Madden '09.