An Ode to Stunt Racing Games
There is a right way and a wrong way to play with Hot Wheels. The wrong way is to purchase and assemble one of those orange plastic tracks with a loop-de-loop in the middle — for they never quite work the way they do in the commercials as real-world physics are far too volatile. Even if your car miraculously makes it up and over the loop there is little assurance it will remain on the track. You’re better off playing Hot Wheels Stunt Track Driver.
The right way is to get a bunch of vehicles and zip them around your home, doing stunts and staging races. This is the fantasy that most other Hot Wheels games deliver on, transforming the interior into the exterior; toys into machines. In the 1980’s, 90’s and aughts there was an absolute spate of stunt racing games, with a cursory Google search returning names like Stunt Car Racer, Stunts, Stunt Race FX, Stunt Racer 64 and Nitro Stunt Racing. There were 15 Hot Wheels games alone released between 1984 and 2013, but I can only really speak to the two I rented as a kid, Hot Wheels Turbo Racing and Hot Wheels: Velocity X.
The first of these was a straight-forward racing game with stunts that provide a speed boost, similar to drifts in a kart racer. Once mid-air you could choose one of 2 axes to rotate along — pitch and yaw — which yes sadly means you cannot do a barrel roll. Velocity X on the other hand was a vehicular combat game a la Twisted Metal or Destruction Derby, with a corny story mode and an emphasis on collisions as well as stunts. In fact a side-genre of the stunt racing game is the crash racing game — not the bandicoot but games like Burnout, FlatOut, Full Auto, MotorStorm, Split/Second and even Trials.
At one point I obtained a demo for LEGO Stunt Rally (not to be confused with LEGO Island Xtreme Stunts), which paled in comparison to the LEGO Racer series. Yet it was still oddly compelling with its RC Pro AM style isometric view, level editor and colourful cast of characters like Sid Vacant and Mr. X. I especially appreciated that last point, since stunt racing games are somewhere between kart, arcade and simulation racers they tend to vacillate wildly in terms of personality. Sometimes you get the sense that the cars are the characters, not in an anthropomorphic Pixar/Putt-Putt way but a sort of autonomous vehicle post-apocalypse scenario. However my absolute favourite stunt racing series choc full of pizazz was from a time when “uber” had nothing to do with cars: the all-time greatest snowboarding games of SSX (apologies to 1080, Cool Boarders and Snowboard Kids). I also have a soft spot for more niche titles like Wave Race, Alpine Racer, Sled Storm, Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam and Rolling Extreme: Street Luge.
One of the best stunt racing games out there is the Wii launch title Excite Truck, which not only had wrestling walk-on-worthy rock riffs but was one of the better uses of the Wii’s motion controls, even though it was played in the un-ergonomic sideways configuration. I haven’t had the chance to play its sequel Excitebots: Trick Racing, however the “what if car but robot” premise strongly reminds me of S.C.A.R.S. from 1998.
I also love how things like TrackMania’s user-generated tracks have this surreal detachedness that feels more like a Monkey Ball level than a race course. For instance I have this vague memory of an N64-era game that looked similar to Rush 2: Extreme Racing USA’s stunt track, except you drove down a grey funnel towards the end of the race where all the cars crashed into one another, kind of like Marbles on Stream or the physical toys that inspired it. Another memory is some sort of wharf level with a bunch of half pipes and really low draw distance that gave it a foggy atmosphere. Games with cars are so ubiquitous that I feel like anyone who grew up with videogames has these weird quasi-navigable spaces lingering in the back of their heads.
Nowadays there’s been a very minor indie renaissance of racing games, due in part to the Switch having a large enough install base to sustain it. However some if not most that I’ve seen have this played-out 1980’s neon aesthetic that doesn’t quite scratch the futuristic F-Zero/Wipeout/Extreme-G/AeroGauge/Pod Racer itch. Nor do most modern racers have the same joie de vivre as something as generic as Beetle Adventure Racing.
