Uniracers (1994)

(This was retro game club game #8 on the Grouvee forum.)

Uniracers (or Unirally) is delightfully silly and surreal nonsense. You race as an unmanned unicycle on floating tube tracks, doing flips and spins whenever you launch into the air. Landing successfully after doing a trick will give you a small boost of speed and hopefully keep you ahead of your opponent (either a 2nd player, or the computer).

But while the weird premise is sound and the unicycles themselves control well enough, I can't quite call this a good game. The biggest issue is that you can't see far enough ahead of your unicycle to react in time to anything. A modern game I'll go ahead and compare this one to is Speedrunners. Modern games of course have a larger retail space to work with, but Speedrunners also has things zoomed out enough that you can see plenty of the map and its upcoming obstacles, allowing you to plan ahead (and still race at breakneck speeds). In Uniracers, you just have to memorize the courses full-stop.

I think the game can be a hoot with a friend for a bit, since it's so silly. But if playing alone it'll get tiring much more quickly. The general presentation in Uniracers is not appealing, with its selection of annoying sound and visual effects. All in all this one's a wonky game with a steep learning curve, and I'd probably rather just play Super Mario Kart or Excitebike.

I don't know which is funniest:

• This nonsense game about living unicycles racing along random pipes, all of which strangely looks like an obnoxious Newgrounds Flash game
• The fact it was made by the team that would go on to make the Grand Theft Auto series
• How Pixar (yes, that Pixar) sued them and won the lawsuit, because Pixar happened to make a cartoon about a living unicycle

At any rate, this game isn't what I'd call great, but it is entertaining -- especially if you play against a friend (in which case it becomes a real hoot). You can't see what's five inches ahead of you in this game, so you just have to memorize the courses. And all the while, you're trying to awkwardly slip in a couple flips and spins every second you're not going uphill, because tricks boost your speed in this game. You'll "wipeout" repeatedly, but you'll always bounce back and return to zipping down the pipe a second later. It takes time to get used to, but it strangely works, and could be called a curious precursor to games like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.

As a one-player game, I'd probably just give Uniracers two stars. But it's really meant to be a multiplayer party experience IMO. That way the bizarre presentation becomes an extra source of amusement, instead of an annoyance.