Carmageddon is the most vile and repulsive game on my list. It makes State of Emergency look like a walk in the park. My brothers were shocked to see how high it ranked on my list, more so when they found out that I ranked it above Burning Rangers. Carmageddon fills my criteria of a great game so perfectly that it is amazing I didn't rank it higher. If I were ranking games based on total time spent playing then Carmageddon is a top-three game.
I had to rank the games based on their importance to me. If I could only play one game for the rest of my days which one meant the most to me? Which game is my absolute favorite and which ones come close? Carmageddon is the closest game that any non-Japanese designers have ever designed. It is in the top-5, it is in a place of great distinction.
Carmageddon was inspired by the classic cult movie Death Race 2000, featuring David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone. If you can get the game to crash the error screen says "Terminate Death Race." There was also an arcade game called Death Race way back in the late 70's. The arcade game had nothing to do with the movie, it was a hot rod race around a cemetery where you ran over pedestrians and tombstones popped up. These peds were also called "gremlins" in some literature. The original arcade game was so repulsive that it was banned from most establishments. About 30 years later the legacy continued when Carmageddon was released and Australia banned the import and sale of the game.
Carmageddon (Carma for short) is repulsive and vile. It came out at the height of a congressional inquiry into violent videogames. Grand Theft Auto and Mortal Kombat were the other big games being dissected at this point. Carmageddon showed up and the debate exploded. The content and purpose of the game could not be argued. You were the participant in a death race, you acquired time and points by running over pedestrians.
After all, look at the play screen. All of the important information appears on screen. There is car position and lap position, in case you really were paying attention to the race. Number of opponents wasted, time, profits and pedestrian kills. You could finish the stage by either winning the race, destroying all of your opponents or killing all of the pedestrians.
The gore was through the roof in this game. Points were rewarded for how many people you could take out in a combo. If you clipped a ped and sent them spinning you might have gotten an artistic bonus, if you plowed through them you might have gotten a splatter bonus. Blood was everywhere and the image of the driver (Max Damage) in the upper left corner sums it up. He seems to derive pleasure from the violence. Congress was in a fit, they had all the evidence they needed to condemn videogames. Only real sickos could find any pleasure in this game.
Seeing as how 1UP is filled with murderous sickos then I feel right at home. After all, those that have been playing videogames for any amount of time are surely riding an immoral path. If you've played Silent Hill and are longing for a giant butcher knife with which to skin people alive then please raise your hand. If you've ever played Mario Bros and have taken magic mushrooms that allow you to throw fireballs then please... raise your hand.
Congress, and many people that "don't get it" see only the surface level of a videogame. They don't understand that the good majority of gamers know the difference between right and wrong. We know the difference between what we see on the screen and our actions in real life. This isn't a case of monkey see, monkey do. This isn't a case of de-sensitation to violence. Violence has been around for as long as human kind has, we don't have the luxury of blaming videogames for the wars we have engaged in. Some of us choose peace, and would rather play games with action or violence than engage in the real deal.
The first two Carma games were made by the people at Stainless Games over in England. SCi published the titles. The people that worked on this game seemed to be out of their mind while they were developing the title. With the debate raging in congress they had the audacity to not only create but market this game as the goriest title ever
While in development Stainless went to extremes to capture the sights and sounds for the game. Polyphony is famous for recording the engine sounds of more than 400 cars for Gran Turismo. On the other side of the planet Stainless participated in demolition derbies to get the authentic sounds of cars crashing. Then they recorded the cars getting hit by bats, bricks and cinder blocks. In order to get an authentic sound of hitting pedestrians they got a good friend, Tony Taylor, the actor that plays Max Damage, to put on a helmet and let himself get hit a couple of times by a slow moving car. Then they took a bat to his helmet and recorded those sounds as well. Some people suffer for their art, none more than those at Stainless.
The plot of the game was set, you started off as either Max in his Eagle, which was a take on a car in the Death Race. Or as the female counterpart, Die Anna, in her faster car, the Hawk. Carmageddon was a sanctioned race taking place all over the world. Anything was legal in this race, including taking shortcuts, running over opponents and pedestrians. There were temporary power-ups scattered over the map and many secrets to discover on the massive maps.
The opponents and cars in the game were all unique. Depending on your rank you could sometimes win their car if you destroyed it in the middle of a race. Each car had different strengths and weaknesses. Some were dainty and some were unstoppable. These cars were designed for the various styles of drivers. All of the cars could be upgraded, money won from the races could be used to purchase extra armor or horsepower.
Carmageddon was the definition of the impossible racer. The physics were good. The cars all handled realistically, more or less. It was what the cars that were capable of that made the game so much fun. The cars were almost indestructible. In any other game a car that hits a wall at 300 mph would explode. In this game it would just wreck the body a little. The cars behaved like Hot Wheel toys on some of the most fantastic tracks ever designed. These tracks had tunnels, massive jumps and drop offs. The cars could even operate under water, in acid, toxic goo, snow and lava. Some tracks were on raceways and others were on rooftops of massive skyscrapers.
Blind intersections where two cars could collide at high speed and send one of them flying a few hundred feet straight up were the rule, not the exception. This helped create a breakneck (no pun intended) pace for gameplay. Drivers and opponents were always willing to go full-tilt at each other or even at the police that patrolled the race because the cars would mostly survive the wreck.
Carmageddon is a great stress reliever. The more people you can get to join in a lan game the better it is. Within a few minutes any person that I've introduced the game to had the car up and running and was shouting "holy shit" at every crazed jump and high speed wipeout.
People often say that Carmageddon would be perfect if only it had weapons like Twisted Metal. I say that they are missing the point. The cars are the weapons. In Twisted Metal the cars don't behave like cars at all, they behave like FPS characters. The mass and momentum of real cars is lost in that game because the designers don't want it to weigh down the gameplay. Carmageddon is a pure game, the car is everything and it is the only thing. There is no more rewarding experience than catching up to a race in progress and wiping out the lineup with a runaway plow. Or dropping down on an unsuspecting opponent that is hobbling on his last three wheels.
Here's the part where you ask "well if this game is so great how come I've never heard of it?" Hell if I know. Stainless made this game back in the day when you could fit a Windows and Mac version of the title on one CD. Most reviewers that played the first fell in love with it. The game was mad hijinks and word of mouth helped it spread quickly.
A large community of gamers became dedicated to the game. Stainless released tool kits to let gamers make their own skins for the cars. The code for some cars that weren't finished with the release of the game were left on the CD. Budding programmers and modelers were allowed to finish the work of Stainless and were fully supported for example with patches that allowed gamers to play in ED-101's flying concept car.
The congressional hearings only helped make Carmageddon a more desirable game by all audiences. As the saying goes "even bad publicity is better than no publicity at all." Despite the negative attacks, magazine editors and gamers both agreed that this game was pretty damn good.
Stainless helped keep the momentum of the game going by releasing the "Splat Pack" shortly after the original was released. The new tracks and cars helped round out the overall experience. The Splat Patch helps cement this game in the top-5.
If this game was so great what happened? The sequel "Carpocalypse Now" was a fun game. The cars were far more detailed and could be pulled apart, pedestrians were no longer sprites but three dimensional models with their own weight and mass. Power ups were more weapon like now. The levels were just as massive and as interactive as they've ever been.
However the experience was less enjoyable the more realistic the game became. Cars could be destroyed far more easily. Some blind hits or explosive barrels could take you apart quickly. This turned a former full out crash and smash title into a delicate shadow of its former self. Realism is not meant for every game and definitely not this one.
Carmageddon 2 was good but not great. The third in the series was absolutely horrid. SCi had just acquired the rights to the Death Race 2000. The official name for the next title would be Carmageddon 3 TDR 2000, SCi figured that they could save some money by giving the game to a new developer and took Stainless off of the job. The game that came out was absolutely horrid.
Everything that was good in Carma 2 was gone. Any remnants from the original game were in name alone. TDR 2000 was panned by gamers and critics and a legacy that could have been was buried some years ago.
I still find the time to play the original game, although OSX on the Mac is making it harder to launch these days. The game holds up very well, even more against a human opponent. My brother was always a fan of Grand Theft Auto and Twisted Metal. There was one game that was more pure and enjoyable than either of these. I hope you get a chance to play it before your computer can no longer run it.
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