Review: Mad Tracks (XBLA)
Overview: Today's review is of a quirky new racing game on the Xbox Live Arcade called Mad Tracks. It's a fun little party game where you drive around spring-powered little toy cars. It's got standard races, but also has a variety of other games such as pool and darts that you play with your vehicle. The game was first released in 2006 for the PC, but seems to have found a better home in the Arcade.
Shininess: The graphics in Mad Tracks aren't anything spectacular, but they are spiffy enough for a quick'n'dirty little XBLA game. Everything seems to flow well and looks nice enough for a game that takes all of 10 seconds to download.
The music is also pretty minimal, but the few mellow lounge-ish, jazz-ish numbers play in the background help make it nice and relaxing.
Funness: Mad Tracks is actually quite fun, for a while. The format of toy cars racing and also doing odd missions or bar games is a nice departure from both the standard race car games and party mini-game games. The single player has a good variety of games with different objectives and goals to get gold, silver, or bronze medals on different difficulty levels. It gives the game a nice collectables aspect. You've got basic races, but there are also games where you have to push a golf ball around a mini-golf course to get into the hole first, drive around on a foosball table to score goals, or just try to push the other cars off a dining room table. The variety will keep you entertained and the Achievements will make you want to go back and try to better your score on each game. Oh, there are also various wacky power-up items like rockets, freeze rays, and EMPs.
There is also an online multi-player aspect, but it's fairly lacking for two reasons. First, you can't stay with the same group of people in a random quick match and just play differenet games over and over. You have to back out to the menu and start a new quick match. Granted, this takes just a couple seconds, but it's kind of annoying and you have to wait for other people to show up in the game again. And that brings us to the second con of the online play. Not a lot of people seem to have this game so it can sometimes take a while to get a match going.
Worthiness: At 800 points (10 bucks in real dollars), Mad Tracks could be a good deal, depending on how much you think you'll play it. Test it out on the demo first to see if you think you'll want to play it over and over. You probably won't. The single player missions will only get you so far, and there isn't a huge online community for it. Maybe everyone's off playing the Halo 3 beta. But if you and a few friends plan on all buying the game, you can have some good party game nights online in a dedicated room to play lots of different mini-games.
Score: 2/5 Download the demo.
Admittedly, I am not a big sports game fan. While I love a good round of Wii Tennis, or some Mario Golf, I am not the dude who waits in line for the next Madden title every single year. The mark of a great sports game for me is one that actually makes me want to play it. Prostroke Golf for the PSP features a fairly realistic golf experience, complete with a course editor and live commentary. It's from a small developer, which shows in its graphical capabilities, long load times and lack of polish, but I believe that it can offer true golf fans something new on the go. As long as you actually own a PSP. 