I’ve been through many examples of games rushed out for financial reasons, with varying levels of disaster as a result. Juiced is a rarer case of the opposite: a game delayed for financial reasons. After the bankruptcy of its original publisher, THQ came in and bought extra time to finish the game off. The result was a game which does what it does about as well as could be hoped, but whose lack of ambition is only magnified by coming even later to the party than intended.
Juiced was a new entry to a crowded street racing genre, and struggles to set itself apart. Its combination of racing, earning, and paying for visual and performance upgrades is very familiar. Even the presentation is old news. Driving along to a very familiar loose beat and cry of “Oof! Ahah-ahah-ah-ah!” is emblematic; after Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition, Juiced was not even the first customisable street racing game of 2005 to have Kasabian’s “Club Foot” on its soundtrack.
Where Juiced is not the same as its rivals, it’s generally through offering less. It has menus rather than the increasingly on-trend open world. It has little of the flashy neon lighting of its rivals. It doesn’t have traffic to dodge. Its innovations are pretty marginal. It has ‘Show-off’ contests where you do donuts and other tricks to score points, which are about 80% faff to 20% fun.
Looser but more extensively blended into Juiced is the focus on individual driver personality, with your reputational standing with various rivals and their crews tracked in detail race-to-race. Every shunt or impressive bit of driving is weighed up and fed back to you. This is coupled to a betting mechanism, with your wagers against individual drivers a much easier way to make bank than going for prize money. Introducing more gambling mechanics into games is a scourge that I’m certainly not going to look back on positively from the current state of things, but the focus on race results does line up with the best part of Juiced.
Put simply, it’s a racing game. The flatly-lit, grey surroundings, and the cars themselves, are pretty uninspiring. Its street circuits are enclosed, straightforward spaces more like those of TOCA World Touring Cars or Gran Turismo 3 than the dynamic Grand Theft Auto expanses of its rivals. But you are properly incentivised to wring the most out of your car within that space, and the total focus on fighting it out against rivals for speed on that limited track helps ratchet up the tension of that racing. It has faded bells and whistles of its own but they’re a distraction. It does best in getting back to basics, reminding you to approach corners slowly and come out fast, and challenging you to do that better than its collection of racers.
Juiced is a game that aspires to little more than adequacy, but it does ultimately get there very comfortably. And it’s practically impossible to make something like that without introducing a couple of quirks, even if they’re unintentional ones. I wasn’t playing games when Juiced came out, but I have a lot of memories of the similarly abundant scene for football games in the late ‘90s. I played a lot of average football games. They fell by the wayside in comparison to SWOS or FIFA 98, but in most cases their own spin on the game still brought a lot of enjoyment for a couple of weeks, usually at a lower cost (and likewise it was discounting which helped Juiced climb to the top). I think it’s a nod to my self of that time that I find myself feeling so much affection towards Juiced, the Viva Football of its own overcrowded genre.
Top of the charts for week ending 9 July 2005:
UK games: Juiced (Juice Games/THQ, PS2) 
Japan games: サクラ大戦V 〜さらば愛しき人よ〜 / Sakura Taisen V (Sega, PS2) 
UK albums: War of the Worlds 
UK singles: 2Pac – Ghetto Gospel 
UK albums: James Blunt – Back to Bedlam