“Safe driver” – Cars – Super Chart Island

**Cars** (Rainbow/THQ, PlayStation 2, 2006)

Going right back to Way of the Tiger, Barbarian II, Sensible World of Soccer, there has been a lot of opportunity in taking already successful games genres and putting them together. In 2006, Pixar’s latest film handed Rainbow Studios a golden opportunity to do just that. One on end of the collision, the children’s animated movie game, filled with recognisable events and characters from the film, a genre already past its peak but still a long way off finished. And on the other end, thanks to the topic of this particular movie, there was the most inescapable genre of the past couple of years: the open world car racing game.

The Burnout games had even already envisioned a version of our world in which people were removed completely to leave only cars. Pixar really just followed that one through to its conclusion: what if the cars WERE the people? If you poke at the details of the worldbuilding the results raise even more difficult questions than in Burnout Revenge, but it was a triumph of marketing and merchandising and the video game did its part in that. It spent five straight weeks at #1 in the games industry’s downtime of late summer.

As a game to enjoy playing, Cars is rather less of a triumph. Unusually for such a game, it features the actual voice cast of the film, but outside of some brief cutscenes it doesn’t get a whole lot of use out of them. As you drive around Radiator Springs, you end up hearing the same single voice lines from each character, again and again. You also get to listen to the similarly monotonous strains of some kind of knockoff instrumental of “Sultans of Swing” and that gets tired fast too. The space you can go around is small and homogenous and bounded in places with unsatisfactory invisible barriers which cause main character Lightning McQueen to vanish and reappear elsewhere.

In general, the idea of the world and map as much more than a glorified menu screen does not last long. Most egregiously, if you open the map of the whole town it marks a location you select, but doesn’t contain any marker for where you currently are. I don’t know if the idea was to try to hide how small everything is, but it’s a terrible choice, leaving you forced to try to make out which of the twenty near identical big rocks on this postcard sketch of a map you are next to. It makes exploring in this child-friendly game much more frustrating and difficult than most of the adult ones it takes after.

As for the options from that menu, there are a couple of briefly diverting mini-games, but the main activity is races. They do the best they can within the drab desert setting, throwing in structures to drive through and coned-off turns from one road onto another, but next to the inventive visions presented by Madagascar the previous year everything is distinctly pedestrian. Consider also the fact that Mario Kart DS had been out for half a year showing how it should be done when it comes to track design. Meanwhile, the way the cars in Cars handle is similarly uninspiring but solid, at least as long as you’re on your own. It’s when other cars come in that things get worse.

First of all, it is way too easy to get spun right around from the slightest touch from another car, leaving little potential for the fun of wheel-to-wheel racing. And after a first race which seems set up to guarantee you a win, the rest are filled with rubberbanding producing manufactured reversals of fortune more extreme than the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. It makes it very difficult to come last (I tried), but also very hard to win unless you can drive with robotic perfection. Which, again, isn’t even a very exciting thing to try with the slow solid handling.

The result is a game which, for all its apparent design as a child’s introduction to a genre, fails to even be as easy or accessible as many of the games it is taking after. Even with a unique opportunity to easily do something different, Cars is very much a return to the licensed game as an execution of the bare minimum necessary to attach to a marketing campaign.