LET'S COMPLETE SPEED MACHINES III IN UNDER 2 AND A HALF HOURS
4Phoenix Games published. Mere Mortals developed. MM not noted anywhere except the copyright. You know this song and dance already. But before you go thinking it, NO. This is NOT the same as 3 other racing specific games i've longplayed before. Oh no, this one IS different... but it's not any better. Infact, it's more what i've gotten from games like Extreme Sprint 3010. AKA, forced repetition to extend a very small game.
Speed Machine III is an overhead racing game where all you do is choose from 2 cars, do a tournament, complete the 5 levels there and win a 3rd car, and that's it. That's the game. The controls are poor, especially turning requiring me to let go to the accel to even turn well, and the game even has physics, where the slightest thing to happen to you can make you explode. Same with the CPU.
Every track can last about 2-3 minutes. Every tournament, about 12 minutes. With loading screens, cause the loading is fairly bad here, it's 15 minutes. So this SHOULD just be a 15 minute longplay, right? ...well, about that. You see, i only mentioned what the game is for ONE car type... out of 10. Yes, there's 10 of these. Now do the math of 15 minutes x 10, and you end up with a 2 hours and 30 minutes game of the exact same stuff.
Ok, so maybe they would give you more than 5 tracks, right? Yes, they do give you... what, 8-10 tracks total? That then become reused again and again, but as reversed, mirrored or reverse mirrored to "change" it? And then they even repeat THOSE sometimes??
Now add that with a CPU that is both stupid and aggressive, who have no problem knocking into you and forcing you to get stuck or explode, but also will struggle hard, even having a 50/50 of one of the CPU cars just immediately turning to a wall and staying stuck there for the entire race. There's even tracks that the CPU legitimately cannot handle at all, getting stuck constantly on many places.
Now let me add that the CPU is also faster than you, so when the CPU is doing ok, they can easily drive right past you on the straights and such. Now let me add that they're able to be faster than you uphill, because you got really slow uphill. NOW let me add that the game will screw you about with bumps on the ground and even force steer you sometimes on some of this uphill stuff. The bumps can even make you go sideways when you don't want it to, causing you to end up crashing without any way to avoid it!
And to finalise it, the jumps suck because they usually require you to be at a certain speed before you get to it. Otherwise, you will most likely never make the jump and end up falling into a crash. You may even see the CPU end up STUCK at a jump, unable to make any progress as the game keeps respawning them back at the jump, putting them in a loop.
With allll of this, add in the fact you're doing this for over 2 hours and you're in for a miserable experience. Now add in the weird, not very good music, the barely any difference in each vehicle type, including the weird ones like the bumpercar looking ones, and you end up with a game that is just... bad. There's even a 2 player mode for all 10 of these car types, that mainly is about getting ahead of your friend in the race and making them no longer be on screen to basically win. I didn't show that, because i think after all of this, you've seen enough of this game to get the point.
Commentary track coming soon.
It's not a shock, this game is bad, it's still Phoenix Games with Mere Mortals at the end of the day. They cannot make a single decent thing together, they usually end up making garbage again and again, and this is just another to the pile. The point of this longplay isn't to just repeat this opinion however: the point of these at this point is to see how bad these are, to see if we can find any semblance of hope from these and to see if maybe, just maybe, there was a point where an attempt to make an ok game was made. With these two and how many times MM keeps their name out of it except for copyright reasons, however, it is a very high doubt that we will see a glimpse of hope from these two on these games and that we will continue to see absolute trash again and again for quite some time from them.
#Longplay #SpeedMachinesIII #PS2