Have you ever thought about how life on this planet began? Whether your beliefs lie in Creationism, Darwinism, or any other “ism” for that matter, it can’t be any worse than what Core design envisioned the dawn of humankind to be. While your mind may wander to our primitive ancestors as lovable characters such as the Flintstones or those hilariously dry cavemen from those Geico commercials, BC Racers will most assuredly taint those visions. The end result turns out to be something uglier and muddier looking than the primordial soup from which they crawled.
Just a scant few years prior to dreaming up hot chicks with big boobs, the folks at Core Design were riding high on their 16-bit cash cow named Chuck Rock. With the next generation of consoles on their way and the popularity of Mario Kart keeping the SNES alive, Core took it upon themselves to create a kart racing game for the 3DO to counter. What was intended to be a whimsical and fun racing game turned into what can only be described as disappointment and disaster for those who invested $700 into their 3DO machines that were supposed to be capable of impressive 3D environments and the perks of CD media. What those poor fools ended up getting was ugliness and racing mayhem at ten frames per second.
There isn’t much to the premise of BC Racers aside from the fact that it’s a generic kart racing game set in prehistoric times running on prehistoric hardware that is still more than capable of running games that look ten times better. The whole game comes across like a homeless guy standing on a corner drinking Starbucks. Despite having the resources for something great, the game just sits there being ugly and busted while refusing to try to make itself better. After a short animated intro that perfectly matches those old Schoolhouse Rock cartoons in terms of overall cheesiness and lack of quality animation, you’re whisked to a generic main menu where you can choose your race difficulty. The difficulty determines the size of the tracks you get; easy tracks are way too small while the “rockhard” tracks are obscenely large and feature a butt-ton of ill-conceived shortcuts. While the intro and the overall look of the game attempt to make you look like you’re in for a nice prehistoric romp, the initial flyby of the start of the race will cast away any hopes you have for this miserable game.
The first thing you’ll notice is the frame rate. Despite other 3DO titles that are able to run full 3D at a decent pace, such as Total Eclipse, BC Racers shambles along like an overweight guy decked out in armor suffering from heat stroke at a really ugly Renaissance Fair. Things only get worse once the race starts as the game sets a draw distance of about five feet as it attempts to draw in its ugly pseudo 3D landscape. What’s worse is that this is the only version of the game that features two-player split screen. If you didn’t believe that machines had feelings and lack the ability to cry, just grab yourself a friend and throw this game in. What little action this game had is quickly drained and you’re left with one hell of a pixilated slide show.
This is about as good as it looks...
The next charming feature you’ll notice is that despite driving two tons of rock and wood, your kart can barely keep itself on the road. Instead, they’ll opt to recklessly skid off-track on every turn as if they weighed just a few pounds or had the aerodynamics of those really cool boats that like to fly off the water and flip over. There is no brake button to slow you down, it’s either “go” or “go faster” as you fight to keep your kart in control and hope to hell it doesn’t hit some piece of shitty looking scenery which, ironically, is the only time your kart will stop dead in its tracks. Anything on the side of the track, from mushrooms, small slabs of rock, and even simple plants will all put a stop to your stone bike speeding at sixty miles per hour. If you think the crazy physics stop there, you’re so very wrong. Some tracks feature bridges that will launch your kart fifty feet into the air and if that’s not enough, it can also turn on a dime while airborne. If you happen to land on a sign, or better yet, another racer, your kart will even bounce back into the air higher than before.
The result of driving into one too many plants.
If the wonky physics and lack of control won’t have you pulling your hair out, the ricockulous track designs damn sure will. Out of the thirty-two possible tracks in the game, only a handful are actually playable. The more you play, the more you realize the developers were nothing more than sadists – veritable Subway sandwich artists of pain and frustration. As you progress through each circuit, the very limits of your patience and will are put to the test as you attempt to skid through curve after curve only to encounter one hairpin turn after another. Much like that scene in A Clockwork Orange, you’ll feel like you’re tied down made to view these horrible images coming at you; only it’s not images of violence, it’s impossible turns in the ugliest places imaginable inhabited by the creepiest looking cave people you’ve ever seen. One track takes place in the dead of night where you attempt to navigate a blue track amongst blue scenery with nothing but a small headlight to attempt to guide your way. A later track has you racing through what one can only guess is a cave, but looks more like a vomit colored cave with a tie dye ceiling littered with stone heads. Ohhhhhhh freaky.
You think I'm exaggerating? Check out the worst set of turns in the ugliest looking level.
In all, you have six groups of characters to choose from - which means two to a kart. You’ll get to choose from an assortment of non-interesting cave people decked in played-out stereotypes such as the rockabilly greaser, the big dumb oaf and his girlfriend, or Chuck Rock himself – which is a stretch for some sort of character recognition. The only interesting duo are Granite and Tina and only on the basis that the game hints, in the most G-rated of ways, at some sort of lesbian undertones – which is hot no matter what. One character drives while the passenger attacks, which can be considered the game’s lone attempt at originality that goes all wrong. Attacking other characters rarely helps and usually ends up with your kart careening off course while you’re attempting to line up an attack. Even more, while characters are given different strengths, all of their attacks are too weak to really do any significant damage to each other. The same goes for having the fastest character, which in the world of BC Racers means that you’ll end up skidding off the track before anyone else. You’re then left with the dilemma of choosing a slower character that gets their ass beat by all of the faster, more controlled computer players. It all adds up to feelings of hopelessness and misery that only your worst nightmares can bring. The best thing to do is to keep your skidding kart from hitting random sticks, fungus, or leaves sticking out of the ground as to not wreck your bike. On the plus side, it would only put an end to the misery that much quicker.
Can you believe this is an animated picture? Okay maybe not.
There is no worse attempt at self-destruction than sitting down and playing this game from beginning to end. Everything, from the unlikeable characters, the shallow as hell gameplay to the failed attempts at Flintstones styled humor bring nothing but feelings of misery. There fact that there’s not even any kind of save feature speaks for the lack of any kind of gameplay or replay value here. Once it’s all said and done, you can’t help but feel like you’ve lost a piece of your soul in the process. Just like clowns, BC Racers attempts to draw you in with images of a lighthearted, yet failed attempts at humor, but it’ll scar you in such a way that you’ll never want to be near it again.
Here are four laps of your life you won't ever get back - and more blue than you can handle.
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