Retro Review - Micro Machines (SNES)

I have recently fallen into the possesion of a tool called a Super Smart Joy which allows me to plug my Super Nintendo controllers into my computer via USB. This means that I can now play emulated games as if I was playing it on the original console. This means I can do accurate reviews of old games from the 90's that you either worship as holy gods amoung games or scorne as primitive , ugly apes. I myself fall somewhere in the middle where by some games are certainly worthy of eternal praise (*cough* Zelda: Link to the Past *cough*cough* Chrono Trigger *cough*) others are worthy of eternal damnation (the laughably titled Shaq Fu). With this perfectly balanced and critical mindset firmly locked in place I give to you my first ever retro review...Micro Machines.

Micro Machines falls into the category I've penned as "non-serious racer" whereby instead of driving on all your favourite real life courses and winning money to spend on your real life dream racing car you drive in imagined, varied and creative environments and reality is thrown out of the moving car and backed over. As a person who doesn't give a single shit about actual motor sports I welcome the non-serious racer as the only type of racing game I'm actually willing to play. Anyway in the case of Micro Machines you race a number of different motorised miniatures around homemade circuits created in everyday settings. You race speedboats around bathtubs, trucks around sandcastles and RC's around pooltables. The levels are where the game truely shines because they're environments thay are extremely familiar but with a dash of fun thrown in. Watch out for the honey on the breakfast table circuit...that sort of thing. It's worth slogging it out in singleplayer just to see where you'll end up next and slog it out you will. Some of the levels, although highly imaginative, are frustration builders. Ah yes there's nothing that can get my teeth grinding quite like a cruel retro game. The problem is that you need to have the levels perfectly memorised at some points because otherwise you'll miss the 90 degree turn and sink into a very deep puddle. The overhead view is somewhat to blame for this but really it's the technology of the age that's the real culprit here. Back then depth couldn't really be done and that's what a good racing game needs. A good retro racer will make up for this by having a map to look at or with powerups to make recovery a little easier. In the case of MM the top down view was their solution and it would work really well except for the fact that you can't see more than about an eighth of a second in front of you, which regularly spells disaster. Remember how in GTA and GTA2 how you'd be trying to make your high speed getaway and then smack into a wall that wasn't there just microseconds before? You'll know what I mean. In fact anyone who's played one of the old top down GTA games will notice a similarity in gameplay. Another niggle is the sound. There is no music during the race at all which is horrible because the only sound that IS present is a horrible 16 bit monotone that fiercly grates at my ears like nothing from recent memory. This is something they failed to fix in the games sequal aswell, much to my disappointment. Actually MM2 was very disappointing for me indeed. All MM2 did was present the same environments, arranged differently. That and they made the characters all lame. In MM, instead of a roster of familiar characters they instead opted for a roster of familiar stereotypes. They were cartoonish and amusing. MM2 does it as well but removes the fun by trying to make them look more real. I'd officially had it with MM2 when they chucked in a pinball level. The reason I disliked it was because it removed the sense that the level had been made by characters in the game. That and it raised the question "how'd they get the cars in a pinball machine?" So just to wrap things up if your interested the original Micro Machines is better but be ready to get angry for not possesing the ninja reflexes necessary to play through some of the courses on the first couple of attempts.