During a week some time ago I discovered, ordered, had delivered and played through Hot Wheels Stunt Track Challenge on Game Boy Advance.
The game is quite good for what it is; a 3D flat-shaded polygonal racing game with fully texture-mapped polygonal Hot Wheels cars.
It features a simple trick system, some over-the-top track designs based loosely on Hot Wheels toy tracks with loops and big set-pieces like dinosaurs, giant spiders, space stations, tiki-heads and volcanoes and such, it also features on-road pickups much like kart racing games do, though with Hot Wheels toy cars instead of cartoony characters in gokarts, and a few different modes of play including a very basic "multiplayer" mode where you and presumably someone else take turns as Player 1 and then Player 2 beating each other's lap times, so sadly no link-cable support in this one.
It plays relatively well with only a bit of choppiness in the framerate at times, with the game running mostly between 20 to 30 fps and around 10 to 15 fps at worst, which is still very nicely done by GBA standards when it comes to games that have advanced 3D graphics like this.
Overall it remained fully playable and enjoyable at all times, the framerate dropping at times never cost me a race, not even once, but it did make some tricks hard to perform at times and I hit the walls in some corners, that's the fullest extent of how bad it got for me at the very worst.
A thing to remember is that this is a game aimed at a specific audience, predominantly young males who play with Hot Wheels toy cars, so being overly difficult like a hardcore sim racer requiring realistic driving skills with unforgiving penalties would've been more of a negative than a positive for this game, but with that said there are still quite a lot of challenges to take on in the various modes the game has to offer.
Basically the game is divided in five modes; Stunt School, Game Show, Champions League, Arcade and "Multiplayer".
I write "Multiplayer" in quotations as this game does not support the link-cable and simply has you take turns racing while the game keeps track of if it's "Player 1" or "Player 2" that's currently racing. Think of it as a "Challenge a Friend" type of Time Trial mode where you race to set a time for someone else to beat and then someone else tries to beat that time.
So this isn't a very good multiplayer game by today's standards, but in its defense older portable consoles like the GBA that came out before the likes of PSP and Wifi with game sharing etc. never really had games that were very good for multiplayer to begin with, at the very least requiring not just two portable consoles but also two copies of the game you wanted to play and a link-cable to connect everything with, and so I can't and won't be too hard on this game about this.
If anything this is one of the select few games I own on pre-PSP hardware I can actually play a sort of multiplayer in at all, the rest all being games I don't own multiple copies of and that nobody else I know owns a copy of either, so even though I own a 4-way GBA link-cable I've never gotten to use it, the only person I know who ever owned a GBA beside myself doesn't have it anymore and he never had the same games I did anyway.
The singleplayer modes are as follows:
Stunt School: a type of tutorial mode taking you through all the different things you can do in the game step by step, similar to the license tests and stuff in games like Gran Turismo, Enthusia and Forza, except here they're fully optional to do and a lot simpler and easier in general, though a few of the tricks and the boost tests can be a bit tricky to pull off correctly, I had to retry some of those multiple times before I got them just right in order to pass and move on.
Game Show: the main mode of the game where you unlock the different cars and tracks available in the game, you take on challenges of different types in one main location after the other, the final challenge of each area is a full on race with opponents and the challenges leading up to it are a mix of successfully performing a stunts or timed point-A to point-B races, with the difficulty slowly ramping up as you go along.
Champions League: consist of pure racing challenges and is unlocked after you've completed all the challenges in the Game Show mode.
Arcade: is further divided into three modes; Test Track, Quick Race and Check Point Challenge.
In the Arcade mode you use the cars and race on the tracks you've successfully unlocked so far, the rest are locked away until you unlock them in the Game Show mode.
Test Track: is what it sounds like, just you alone driving along a select track with a select car, a sort of training mode displaying your current lap time as the only on-screen information, nothing more than a basic mode for testing the tracks and sadly a completely lackluster substitute to a proper Time Attack mode as it doesn't save or keep track of your best lap times, so if you wanna keep track of how fast you've been around a track you'll just have to do it the old school way and write them down manually, maybe in a text document on a PC or write them down on a piece of paper using a pen, pencil, crayon or even a paintbrush! The choices are endless, ENDLESS I SAY!
Sadly, writing down your best times is made a lot harder as the game doesn't keep track of anything and you literally only get to see the lap time flash on screen for a couple of seconds before it starts over with your current and counting lap time instead, so manually pausing every time you complete a lap becomes a must in order to write down the displayed time properly.
As someone who usually loves Time Attack or Time Trial modes I honestly didn't bother with any of this and only used this mode to get used to the controls and handling a bit before moving on to the other modes.
Quick Race: is a randomly generated regular race where you drive a random car on a random track against three random opponents, first one across the finish line after a few laps wins the race.
Check Point Challenge: is an arcade-style timed-race between checkpoints; fail to reach a checkpoint in time and you lose, hitting a checkpoint grants you more time to reach the next one and so on til you reach the final checkpoint and the first to cross the final checkpoint wins the race.
There are pickups scattered around the track similar to most kart racing games; there are offensive, defensive and performance enhancing pickups.
The two offensive ones is a magnet that sucks your opponents in and then flings them upward and a kind of force field that forcefully pushes them away from you if they get too close.
The defensive pickup is a shield that nullifies the use of any of the two offensive pickups.
The two performance enhancing pickups is power steering for better handling that allows you to turn sharper without powersliding and losing speed in sharp turns and a boost pickup that fills up your boost meter so a boost can be executed, the boost pickup is the only pickup you can manually activate when you want after having picked it up, the rest are all activated as you drive through them and all last a few seconds before wearing off.
The game also features a stunt trick system to gain points for the boost ability, different tricks give different amount of points and combinations of tricks give additional points, when the boost meter is filled all the way up it can be unleashed by pressing both shoulder buttons together, giving your car a few seconds of boosting that can then be further prolonged by picking up boost icons or doing more tricks before the boost runs out.
You can also do a quick boost when starting a race or time your button pressing with the A-button to the countdown timer to get a full boost bar, this was what I personally opt to do every race as it's much easier timing the A-button to the countdown timer than timing the awkward quick boost, and also having a full boost bar lets me have the boost ready for when I feel it's a better time strategically to use it.
Stunt tricks are performed in the air after hitting jumps placed around each of the different tracks.
The tricks themselves are easy to perform and consist mostly of single button presses on the d-pad or either of the two the shoulder buttons, and at the most advanced they still are nothing more demanding than holding down the B-button in combination with pressing a direction on the d-pad, all very simple stuff, the hard part is combining multiple of them in time before you land, for if you perform a trick but it's not over before you land then you spin out and have to wait a few seconds while your car resets back onto the track, usually leading to at least an overtake or two by the opponent cars.
Speaking of the opponents, they are rubberbanded like crazy and will never be more than a couple of seconds away no matter how much you boost, but there are only three of them so it makes sense at it could become very lonely on the track if they were allowed to fall behind too far, though I think they could've been a little bit more lenient with the distance as any single failed trick is almost guaranteed to set you back at least a position or two, thankfully the rubberbanding works both ways, allowing you to catch up and if you're good enough and even take back the lead with relative ease.
There is no automatic way to save your progress in-game, instead it relies on giving you relatively short text-based passwords to write down in order to continue where you left off the last time you played.
This can be a hassle when you want to play on the go as you also have to have both a pen and paper or some other means to write down the password with when you're out and about. A rather old school problem for such an advanced game on such an advanced console, no pun intended, many other games had proper save features so this is a bit archaic no matter how you twist and turn it. I have no issues with a password system, in fact I think it's a great way to get into a game if you've lost your save file somehow, but in a Game Boy Advance game from 2004 I expect an internal save file system to be the main way to save my progress and a password feature being a secondary backup type option, not the main one.
Another issue with the password system is that it requires two passwords if you want to unlock all the things you've unlocked previously, you see the Stunt School has separate passwords from the Game Show and Champions League passwords, so while you can opt to only keep the Game Show/Champions League passwords that unlocks the cars and tracks you won't be able to retry any Stunt School challenges without that second password unless you play through it from the beginning every time.
Graphically the game looks very good, the polygonal environments have enough detail to them to not look too flat and simple and the cars all look quite good thanks to the use of textures, and unlike a majority of 3D games on GBA the cars and tracks all play with the same framerate. I have lost count of how many games on GBA I've played that have the environment run at one framerate and the cars run in a different framerate, like Top Gear Rally and Starsky & Hutch just to name a couple.
It's not the worst thing ever or anything when games do that as a way to compromise in order to make the overall experience smoother by limiting the framerate for a single thing on screen that takes more processing power to render than the rest does, but having it all run in unison like this game does makes it feel like a better unified experience when everything runs at the same speed, even if that means the overall framerate suffers a bit at times when all four cars are on screen at once alongside large and detailed roadside objects like the dinosaurs or giant spiders.
Overall I'd say this game is on the level of 3D 32X games, like Virtua Racing Deluxe, and as a 32X and Virtua Racing fan I can't complain about that, it's one of those games I'd say proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Game Boy Advance was a bonafide 32-bit generation console and not just a portable Super Nintendo, which was sadly something far too many games falsely made it out to be.
The sound design is also very good, you can adjust the volumes of the sound effects separately from the music in the options menu, the music is good I think, it sounds good quality-wise and I like the individual compositions, I've hummed along with some of the songs while playing and even at times doing other things, so one could even say they're a bit on the catchy side.
The sound effects are also good, the engine sounds fine and you can hear the different pitch as it revs higher before a gear change and such, the sound effects for the pickups and other things are also well made and sound like you'd imagine, the only sound I didn't care for was the noise that plays as you perform a trick, it doesn't fit the action performed in my opinion and I can only describe it as a generic "electric" sound, none of my Hot Wheels toy cars can make a noise like that and I'd've preferred a more whooshing sound like that of a swinging sword or something over this seemingly random noise.
It may seem a bit pedantic complaining about a single sound effect in an otherwise good sounding game, but because of how often you perform tricks and are forced to hear it it becomes one of the most common sounds in the game, and as such I think more care should've been taken when selecting this sound effect.
The controls are simple, intuitive and functional, nothing much more to say that I haven't already mentioned, you accelerate, brake, turn, perform tricks while airborne and use the boost when available, that's about it.
With the framerate issues at rare times affecting the input of tricks and turning in corners being the only real complaint, but as I wrote earlier it's nothing major and it never caused me to lose a race.
The presentation is okay, if a bit generic and cheesy, it has some CG rendered still photos of a dude bro guy fellow person who introduces you to the different modes and such, in text he explains what you do in the next challenge, he congratulates you if you win and encourages you to do better next time if you lose.
You can press Start to skip his longer pieces of dialog if you've read them already and know what to do.
There's not too much replay value in here as once you've completed all the challenges there's really not much else to do, just race for fun in the different modes as you please or maybe try the "Multiplayer" mode with a friend, that's it.
I felt it was a good length for a GBA title without a built-in save feature, it would've been too much if I had to keep writing down any more passwords than I already did, and for this playthrough I started playing it emulated on PSP, so I used savestates for every time I got a new password until I got the actual game in the mail a couple of days later.
It goes against the nature of a game like this but due to the use of passwords I'd recommend playing for slightly longer periods of time and getting more things done than just short burst of gameplay, so you only have to write down as many passwords as minimally needed.
A sidenote on the passwords for the Stunt School is that you have to use the password you get BEFORE taking on the final challenge, as you don't get a password for completing it and in the Password screen in the Options menu where the password is displayed it changes to the word COMPLETE, meaning if you missed to write down the last password before taking on the final Stunt School challenge you'll have to use an earlier password and play through what's left again, so in the scenario where you plow through the Stunt School and don't write down ANY passwords, thinking you can just take the last one and all will be fine and dandy, you'll have to do it all over again even after having completed it, as you would've missed the only password you were after.
And yes, this means every time you use the final Stunt School password you'll still have to do the final challenge again to actually complete Stunt School.
Thankfully as the Stunt School is fully optional and works more like a tutorial mode as already described this becomes an almost complete non-issue.
The passwords for the two main modes work together as they should though, once you unlock Champions League every password you get from then on also unlocks the entire Game Show mode, all the cars and all the tracks.
You can ofcourse also just look up the passwords online as they are the same for everyone and not automatically generated by the game with any unique information in mind, so you could technically play the game and just look up a password online for where you were last time you played instead of writing them down like I did, personally I don't have a smartphone with internet access so I had to maintain my passwords like most would've done back when this game was new.
★★★★★
My final verdict for the game is a strong 4/5, a 9/10 if you will, as I enjoyed playing through it, just the fact I did play through the whole thing despite the minor inconveniences says a lot, it's rather graphically and technically impressive, it plays well with easy to learn controls and it has good sound overall.
Simply put, this is the kind of game I like the most on GBA.
The star score is a 4/5 though because if I have to round it up or down I'm rounding it down, the game is truly great and I have a great time playing it but it isn't fantastic enough to earn that 5/5 score, the framerate could've been better, a solid 30fps at least could've been achieved, I'm sure of it, and the password system should've been backed up with a proper save file system, it was a common enough feature in Game Boy Advance games.
