Extreme Go Kart Racing

Ever crash headfirst into a cactus? Trust me---it's not a very pleasant experience. Neither is playing Extreme Go-Kart Racing, for that matter, seeing as the aforementioned event is one of the many negative occurrences that you will experience in this game. Not only are the poorly animated graphics reminiscent of every bad claymation film ever made and the characters' voices too goofy and unintelligible for all but the most avid cartoon fan to take seriously, but the controls are so sloppy and unresponsive that smashing your kart head-first into obstacles is one of the most likely occurrences that will happen to you as you try to out-drive six other competitors at once. Even pulling out at the beginning of the race is difficult and will leave you mashing the acceleration and directional buttons in an effort to simply roll out of last place. Using the Turbo and Drift functions does no good during the race, either, as both only encourage the likeliness of smacking into something. Your only hope of ever coming out on top, then, is to run over your opponents, since there are no weapons available to help clear them out of your path. Of course, you must be sure that your kart is heavier than that of another racer, because if not, all you'll do is spin out of control and lose valuable time---a very irritating predicament, indeed. To make matters worse, you only start out with one of several tracks on which you can practice your driving skills in Time Attack mode, the rest of which you can only unlock after you fumble your way across them in Grand Prix mode. Therefore, there is little (if ANYTHING) you can do to prepare for future dangers other than face them head-on in the tournament itself.Only the most forgiving PSX owner will find anything worthy in Extreme Go-Kart Racing. Everyone else, in contrast, will be left to wonder as to when the people at A1 Games will clean up their act and actually HIRE people to test their games before they put them out on the market, as it is quite evident that they did not do so here.

If there ever was a knock off of Mario Kart , this would be it, stages look to be a poor copy of what Nintendo did with Mario Kart 64 and even has a character in the game that really looks like Princess Peach. This game is fun to play if you master the drifting abilities of the go kart you are driving but you will find yourself banging your head into the wall when you first play this game as it's difficult to master. You can only play courses again once you have mastered them and you even have additional characters to unlock. The unlock conditions are unclear as you play but I'm sure that I'll figure it out eventually.Not a bad game but seems clumsy in design.