(This was retro game club game #12 on the Grouvee forum.)

The Nintendo 64 was a great console for simple but fun arcade racing games. How does this goofy racer featuring nothing but Volkswagen New Beetles fare?

It's good! Not amazing, perhaps not even great. But not bad either. This is an easy one to jump into and get the hang of quickly. Get in your bug and start driving as fast as you can. Pick up those speed boosts, and keep an eye out for every hidden shortcut you can slip down. There aren't many tracks, but they are fun and imaginative, and filled with wild set pieces.

The tracks though, are also really, really long. For an arcade racer, I think that just isn't a good fit. Each race drags on and on, and I generally ended up with long stretches of never having any opponent racers anywhere near me at all. The excitement of the genre is simply lost in such instances.

To be honest I kind of feel it shouldn't have been an arcade racer at all, and instead aimed for something more befitting the "groovy" aesthetic it seemed to kind of, sort of try to be going for. Would a more "chill" open-world driving game with simple tasks to complete at your leisure have been acceptable in 1999? (Or even now?) I don't know, but the idea sounds kind of appealing. I know I've had times where in open-world action games (like Just Cause 3 lol), I would pick up a car and aimlessly drive around for a while -- just zone out, see where I can go, enjoy some tunes (or perhaps listen to a podcast). An untapped market there maybe?