- About this item LEGO Racers.
.com
----
Customize your own unique LEGO Car and LEGO Driver, then
challenge up to five other drivers in landscapes based on four
LEGO System themes. A unique power-up system provides players
with numerous ways to gain the upper hand. Discover hidden
shortcuts and secret pathways that will help you defeat your
Champion challengers and become the best in the ultimate racing
test!
From the Manufacturer
---------------------
Customize your LEGO car and LEGO driver, then challenge
up to five other drivers in landscapes based on four LEGO SYSTEM
themes. A unique power-up system provides players with numerous
ways to gain the upper hand. Discover hidden shortcuts and secret
pathways that will help you defeat your champion challengers and
become the best in the ultimate racing test.
P.when('A').execute(function(A) {
A.on('a:expander:toggle_description:toggle:collapse',
function(data) {
window.scroll(0,
data.expander.$expander[0].offsetTop-100);
});
});
Review
------
Kids loved this fast-paced, highly responsive racing
program. After creating a car and driver in the LEGO garage or
selecting an existing design, children race against up to five
challengers around one of 12 tracks. These tracks are based on
four popular Lego themes: pirates, castle, space and adventurers.
Each track has special attributes such as turbo boosts, oil
slicks and grappling hooks. Winning a race earns special car
parts that can enhance a car's performance. Aside from tricky
controls in the car building section, children were thrilled with
the racing moves they could make on the colorful, entertaining
tracks. We couldn't find any violent or otherwise worrisome
content and felt that children as young as age five could easily
play the game. This is the first LEGO title to be available on
the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 as well as Windows.
Teaches: strategy, logic, game play
Age Range: 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 Copyright © 2000 Children's
Software Revue -- From Children's Software Revue® -- "Subscribe
Now!" ( https://secure.tradenet.net/childrenssoftware/csroffer.html )
LEGO Racers is everything you'd expect it to be: a simple,
colorful, and fun high-speed romp through a land built entirely
of those famous snap-together building blocks.
Essentially, LEGO Racers is much more of an arcade-style racer
than anything else and seems like it would be more at home on a
PlayStation than on a PC. It has little regard for physics and no
real car damage modeling. Instead, it's a fast-paced game of
unlimited powerslides and limited but plentiful power-ups on one
of several fairly well-designed tracks. With these power-ups,
you'll be able to shoot at an nent in the lead, drop an
obstacle on someone trailing behind, use a temporary
invulnerability shield, get a turbo boost, or receive an
enhancement to one of the above four. These power-ups are crucial
to your success and basically constitute all of the game's
strategy.
The actual racing in LEGO Racers boils down to the simplest of
arcade racing principles - momentum. Though some of the tracks
are truly challenging, if you can gain a solid lead on your
competitors, your victory is more or less assured; conversely, if
you let an nent gain a solid lead, the best you can hope for
is second place. This principle holds true for every single track
in the game, which may prove frustrating for much younger LEGO
aficionados not yet skilled in the art of playing computer games.
In fact, LEGO Racers doesn't even have adjustable difficulty
levels, which makes it seem as though it were intended for more
experienced console gamers rather than for the small children of
a PC owner.
Nevertheless, LEGO Racers is still quite fun to play, not only
because its racing is solid and fast-paced, but also because it
sounds good and looks great. You can't really be in any part of
the game, not the building editor, the options menu, nor the
middle of a race, without hearing some sort of cheery, upbeat
cartoon music. And should you be in the middle of a race, you'll
no doubt be surrounded by the ambient growl of your car's LEGO
engine, the blast of a cannon power-up, and the cheers of triumph
or shouts of dismay that you and other drivers will utter as you
pass one another.
LEGO Racers looks even better than it sounds. When playing in
3D-accelerated mode, virtually everything in the game looks
bright, colorful, and clean - races take place with no evidence
of slowdown or pop-up, though getting into the occasional
accident may cause some clipping. The texturing is minimal for
the most part, though that's to be expected in a game whose decor
is based on single-colored building blocks. However, beneath LEGO
Racers' seemingly plain visage lies a good deal of subtle detail.
Seven different official LEGO sets are present in the game in the
form of racing nents, track designs, and blocks for use with
the build-your-own-car utility (which is somewhat limited because
little space is provided to add new blocks to your car).
You can also create and customize your own LEGO driver using sets
of over 20 hats, heads, torsos, and legs, as well as variations
on facial expression. And the drivers are quite possibly the best
thing about LEGO Racers. The art team has done a remarkable job
animating every driver in more or less exactly the way you'd
expect a LEGO figure to move, if LEGO figures could somehow come
alive and move of their own accord. Even in the fanciful
cutscenes, the characters' movements stay true to the original
plastic LEGO person: No one's hand unclenches from its perpetual
C-shaped claw, and no one's leg suddenly bends at the knee.
However, all the drivers wave, cheer, jump up and down, look
about, and walk around in a way that lends each an appreciable
and thoroughly enjoyable helping of personality.
It's unfortunate, but aside from its fun if simple racing, good
sound, and great graphics, LEGO Racers doesn't really have much
else to offer. It features several modes of play, but all are
fairly standard: a practice race, a timed race, a single race,
and a circuit race (which is used to unlock new tracks and cars).
Unfortunately, even though the circuit race mode offers six sets
of four tracks and a seventh, final race for a total of 25, 12 of
the 25 are simply previous tracks run in reverse. All told,
including the practice track, that's really only 14 distinct
races total, and none of these is particularly long.
Single-player races are three laps, though you can set your
two-player races to as many as five. And though the tracks are
designed well enough for the most part, unless you fall madly in
love with a certain few, you may find yourself growing a bit too
familiar with them over time.
Regardless of its shortcomings, LEGO Racers is still quite fun.
Its bright colors, generally simple gameplay, and kid-friendly
graphics and sound also make it a safe purchase for concerned
parents, though some of its more challenging tracks may not go
over well with the very young.--Andrew Seyoon Park
--Copyright ©1998 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction
in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written
permission of GameSpot is prohibited. -- GameSpot
See more ( javascript:void(0) )