Micro Machines v4
Little racers that couldn't.
Published: July 18, 2006
As the first and final strains of a man's rage-fueled scream ebbed in and then faded from Bennie's ears, he downshifted and floored it again. This man would return in a few seconds, and he would be rather pissed off. This was the idea, of course. Piss a man off, and he loses his focus, can't properly judge a corner, can't apply the brakes at the precise moment it takes to powerslide around the next corner, to throw the car into a dance of speed and momentum and grip and weight that made these corners new every time. That meant he was only mentally racing against two others now.
The first of them would meet a simple fate, tearing across Bennie's view as an errant jerk of the wheel sent them pogoing off an azure chunk of chalk. His leap off the table wasn't filled with any sort of directed malice, but he was pissed all the same. Another mentally removed from the competition. The final of the remaining pair was a tougher nut to crack. As Bennie roared up alongside him, casting a quarter-second glance at the driver, he realized he had made a mistake. He did know this man.
This was Tad Smithington. This was the man that killed his birthparents. A 47 year-old leadfoot with a long streak of fantastic blowouts and mangled bodies as he pushed his machine well beyond its limits, often at the expense of the lookers-on that would watch the man race. Bennie's folks were just plum unlucky to be exiting a restaurant along a stretch of Highway 52, a windy, barren patch of road that threaded through the alleyway between the FullSizers' smoky grey and near-blindingly orange houses on Hope Street. Tad lost control and took out nearly the entire diner. Tad suffered a bruised rib. Tad's victims were not so lucky.
Adrenaline poured into Bennie's veins, a thick slurry of rage and frustration turned his vision crimson. Now it was Bennie who was mentally out of the race. As he steeled himself for the final turn of the second lap, he pulled hard to the left. Too hard. The left front of his car nicked a burning cigarette butt and the acrid smell of melting rubber was enough to let him know it was a costly mistake. As he straightened out, Tad's machine roaring off and a gentle flop-flop sound building in his ears, Bennie punched the gas again, half-listening to the rubber distend as it spun a normal tire's entire lifetime in the span of a few seconds...
And so on. This is what Micro Machines v4 has done to me. Driven me mad, forced me to write bad fanfic-level drivel for no real reason other than to fill in the blanks on something that probably didn't need it. Visually, the game's not terribly exciting (it's aided by the RenderWare engine, which means it runs fairly well, but it's not the hardware showcase that other games have been), and it sounds basic enough to get the job done, but at the end of the day, it's just not interesting enough to merit dropping even $30.
There's fun to be had in the game, in excremely small doses that can be meted from the otherwise frustrating bits, but it all feels like wasted potential, and by folks that just didn't understand the PS2. When a game that's CD-based, takes 30+ seconds to load a level (hell, it takes that long just to load the title screen and continually frustrates with see-sawing difficulty is presented as an update to a classic series... well, maybe it was best left a classic.
