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By brikrok3 (26th Jun 2008)

It’s a strange feat, no doubt, to create a narrativeless videogame upon the back of a plot-laden television show-turned-movie. Like a child more interested in the box than the toy that came in it, the producers of Speed Racer have kept the superficial husk of the show and discarded more or less anything resembling a plot. Then again, Speed Racer, the 2008 film, isn’t exactly a narrative in the tradition of Hitchcock. The original Japanese cartoon from the 60s, on the other hand, easily exceeded expectations—thus its failure with the under-ten Sunday-morning crowd and its legions of die-hard fans today, thanks to the series revivals in the 80s and 90s. All of this plotting more or less goes out the window, though, once you get the game. Here the focus is, for the most part, on racing and any move away from that has no real narrative function whatsoever.

The game follows Speed, the young gun stunt racer, who is looking to take the World Racing League championship. He’ll be racing against Racer X, a shadowy figure who is in fact Speed’s thought-dead brother. This shabby plot aside, the game offers a few nifty features. Before each race, for instance, you’ll have the choice between keeping and breaking alliances and rivalries (known as Allies and Rivals). This is a calculated risk. Building alliances means protecting your butt: allies won’t attack you. But imposing rivalries means more danger and thus greater opportunities for point acquisition, which you can use to build your speed boosts. It’s a Survivor-style take on racing, the result is great, offering you the opportunity to think rather than simply play through the game.

The game is for the most part a single-player affair, though head-to-head two-player racing is also possible. For the most part, the latter is the better option, though it suffers the problem most typical of racing games: split screen. So you’ll need a giant screen to alleviate bleeding-eyes syndrome, a common condition among the five-hours-of-gameplay-a-day set. Consider yourself warned.

The control scheme is quite simple. Speed Racer follows the standard horizontal-tilt mode: merely lean the controller from one side to the other, hitting 2 to accelerate and B to employ you power boost. The A button you’ll use to “heal” the car after significant dust-ups. For the most part, this works very well, not being either too easy or too over-sensitive. Moreover, there’s no real way for you to go flying off the intensely angled tracks unless you’re hit by another car. This all ties into the game’s particular brand of racing, known aptly if lamely as car-fu. Using the Wiimote while pressing an arrow on the D-pad will allow you to jump, spin, and twist while you’re driving, knocking players off the track, back flipping on top of trailing opponents (causing them, often, to implode), or torpedo spinning to whack leading racers. For each successfully completed move, you’ll be awarded power-boost points, which you’ll be able to deploy for pressing, split-second finishes. Racing, then, constitutes only about half of the game’s strategy; for the most part, you’ll be flipping, twisting, and turning in the air, crushing opponents and gaining much-needed speed boosts.

The game looks very good; that can’t be doubted. And yet it looks only fleetingly like the anime series that spawned the entire franchise four decades ago. Gone is not merely the anime aesthetic, but in many ways the characters who founded the show. Instead of a classic anime look, then, we get something more like an early 90s futurism—everything is prism-shaped, black, and neon punctuated. Speed’s beloved car, the Mach 5, is however still around, though even this has undergone some refinishing, taking on a more Viperish and less go-fast swinging 60s look. Racer X has undergone the most radical change, shedding his faintly homosexual posture, outfit, and banana-like and whimsically named car, the Shooting Star, and opting for a more new American-style arch-villain aesthetic: handsome, draped in black, mysterious, and cunning. Judging by its overall look, it’s clear that game is an adaptation of the film, rather than the classic show, though vestiges of the original—the slightest automobile detailing—hang on for dear life.

The game’s audioscape is more or less what’s to be expected: propulsive electronic music coupled with ferociously loud engines, explosions, and character voice-overs. The last of these are done well, and they seem lifted from the film. The music is at times, though, less obnoxious than one would expect, lacking the exhausting anxiety-inducing beats of most high-intensity games. Admittedly, we’re not talking elevator music here—this is the type of music that keeps grandmothers complaining about the “youth of today”—but music a bit less grating than your average fare. Overall, the game sounds as good as it looks.

Ultimately this is a good if not great game. Which is to say, the game’s better than I expected. By this point, Speed Racer the game is some half-a-dozen moves away from the original Japanese cartoon show of the 60s—the show, the Americanized remakes, the earlier games for DOS, SNES, and Playstation, the recent film, and now the game for Wii, DS, and PS2—and shows it. This needn’t be a bad thing, but nonetheless forces one to wonder if the Speed Racer we get in 2008 has really much to do with its ostensible progenitor. In a sense, it’s hard to say no, the game retaining at best a fleeting residue of the original. Even the Speed Racer most Americans know today is hardly the original, maybe not even the translated version from the 80s, but the wholly new show produced in the 90s, almost two decades after the death of the original series creator, Tatsuo Yoshida. That being said, this is a good game, combining first-rate racing with great car-fu. For those who love racing games but have tired of their redundancy, Speed Racer will be a must-have; for the rest of us, it’s at the very least worth the rental.