Backlog Beatdown: Racing in the Street with Street Racer

Street Racer is a game I’d been aware of when it came out in 1994 for the SNES, through the TV show Bad Influence. I played the Playstation port of it a few years later at my mate Matt’s house, and even though I didn’t think it represented the power the Playstation purported to have, I seem to remember having a decent amount of fun with it. I bought it a few weeks ago, again to have a light-hearted game I could pick up and play. Here’s how I got on:

You’d think with a name like Street Racer you’d be racing in streets, but in actual fact you’re rarely doing anything of the sort. It is, in essence, a go-kart racing game filled with wacky characters, colourful backgrounds and useful power-ups. Sounds familiar? Well, it was never going to shake off the inevitable comparisons to Super Mario Kart, but Street Racer does enough of its own thing to provide a different kind of challenge.

Hodja purports to have average stats,
but is a surprisingly difficult opponent.

The racing is decent enough. The tracks are short, but tightly designed with lots of corners and it’s surprisingly challenging to maintain concentration for ten laps. The power-ups consists of Stars (a bonus for collecting the most,) rockets for a ‘boost’ button, dynamite which can send you flying if you’re in possession of it when the timer runs out, and med-kits to heal yourself. My only complaint – and I’m not sure whether this is because I’m playing the game on the PS2, my disc is in quite poor condition or there’s a fault in the game’s code – is that you often get massive frame drops that slow the game right down.

 This being an early PS1 game, analogue controls are not supported here, but the rest of the controls are pretty well laid out, with the one puzzling exception that for some reason you have to press down to reverse. The shoulder buttons are where things get interesting; the top two buttons attack left or right, and the bottom two activate your special moves.

Yes, you have special moves. Each character, along with their base stats, have two of the following: A projectile attack, an attack on both sides, an area-of-effect attack that alters the handling of the rival cars, and a short flight that can carry you over obstacles but slows your car down considerably. Getting to know which character has what moves, and what you can expect if you play with or against them, is part of the learning curve of the game! Getting hit will slow you down, and if you run out of energy the effect is even worse.

The characters themselves are well-designed stereotypical caricatures that rarely happen in games these days (although they seem to be making a comeback now thanks to games like Overwatch and League of Legends.) Frank, for example, is a classic Frankenstein’s monster, Raph is an Italian racing boy, and Biff is an American baseball thug. Their stats are based on Acceleration, Top Speed, Handling and Grip. The latter two struck me as odd, as I thought they would be the same thing, but it made sense about half-way through my playthrough – Handling is how well your car steers, but if you steer for too long your car will spin out. How long this takes to happen depends on your grip.

Surf's fast, but can she handle those corners?

Maybe it’s to do with my playstyle, but I did notice something of an imbalance with the stats, as the faster characters tended to be a lot harder to handle because of the design of the tracks. Raph, for example, has the fastest car in the game and is great for straights, but as most of the tracks are made up almost entirely of heavy corners at which he is useless, he’s not an easy character to play. I tended to play as Frank, who has high acceleration so can get up and go out of the corners, and high grip so I wouldn’t spin out.

The game features three competitions: Bronze, Silver and Gold. The higher the competition, the higher the number and challenge of the tracks. The AI appears to be set up so that there is a pre-determined order everybody will place unless you do something about it, and whoever is in first place will be hard to catch, but somehow it still feels like a race as the AI cars attack each other and you in an effort to win. You get points for your position in the race, but you also get bonus points for hitting the most opponents, having the fastest lap, collecting the most stars etc.

The game also features a ‘Rumble’ mode where you compete to be the last car standing in a circular arena that everybody is trying to push everybody off using their attacks, special moves and dynamite. There is only one arena here and the championship lasts for ten rounds. You’d think it would get boring but actually there is a surprising amount of strategy as the league table takes shape. You won’t win every round, but you can help yourself by knocking out the front-runners first so that they will get the least points at the end. Biff was my go-to character for this one.

The reward for finishing both modes is the same cutscene of the pink rabbit that appears on the box art trying to cross the road and then getting in a car and looking in his wing mirror. Not sure what all that was about. Also, in certain versions of the game there is a ‘Football’ mode, where you play football with the characters in their cars. It wasn’t included in the Playstation version of the game but as I understand it, the mode wasn’t particularly well-handled. It’s certainly not going to impress anyone who plays Rocket League!

In fact, what sets this apart from the other versions of the game (not that I’ve played them!) is the CD-quality soundtrack that was the staple of a lot of early PS1 games. It was a gloriously innocent time of well-written music that complimented the level design but wasn’t necessarily ambient or atmospheric as it tends to be today.

While few would describe this game as excellent, and it will always pale in comparison to Super Mario Kart, I’ve had a lot of fun with Street Racer. It’s a nice little game that I’m glad I didn’t pay any substantial amount of money for, and it’s worth a look if you fancy doing something a little bit different with a racing game. It’s a laugh, but don’t expect a miracle.