The world of early CD-ROM games shows some emerging standards. MegaRace’s electronic soundtrack is nothing on Rebel Assault’s Star Wars score but, just like that that game, MegaRace uses streaming of pre-rendered backdrops to allow you to travel through spectacular environments. I’m not sure if its testament to my poor observational powers, or to the skill of developers Cryo, that I didn’t realise immediately that MegaRace’s race-tracks are as static and unalterable as Rebel Assault’s flight paths. Certainly there was something immediately odd feeling about the way that you come up behind another car and then follow it at a precisely maintained constant distance for a while before getting the chance to deal with it. There was a clear invisible hand pushing you to stay on the right track. But the barriers, never mind the opponents, at least feel more like they are really there.
That’s not much of a compliment, and there isn’t much to compliment in how MegaRace plays. Essentially Chase HQ but in another dystopian high tech future and without the innocent by-drivers or sense of fun, you are tasked with chasing down and destroying various cars. Shoot them, bump them into the wall, or go past them and wait for them to spontaneously combust, and the next one soon appears in front of you. The spongy handling means it’s a relief to have something to concentrate on other than following the track, and further to that you do have some go faster arrows to try to hit, if not any cabbages to avoid.
The visuals are relatively flashy but now cloudy-looking in exactly the same way as Rebel Assault, and whizzing through futuristic cities or underwater tunnels never gets as involving as it could. Which would leave MegaRace a thoroughly underwhelming game if it wasn’t for the fact that, also like Rebel Assault, the presentation of the non-playable elements has a larger than normal role to play.
MegaRace went all in on FMV and recording an actor, with many lengthy sequences of exposition. Christian Erickson (not to be confused with Christian Eriksen the footballer) plays the oh-so-subtly-named Lance Boyle, the game show host introducing your role as the Enforcer, selected for virtual world television to destroy all those no good punks ruining the roads. The story emphasises this messed-up future world and revels in the idea of destruction and risk, but at the same time keeps pointing out that it’s all taking place in a virtual world and no one is really being harmed. It’s a peculiarly toothless way of having its ultraviolence and eating it.
Handed this rather sorry material, though, Erickson makes it sing. (Apologies to readers who are not British/didn’t grow up in the ‘90s for the forthcoming comparison…) He plays the host role like Richard O’Brien on The Crystal Maze turned up to 11, a twinkly trickster whose flashes of warmth and of danger go hand-in-hand, and who under the surface always seems just slightly amused by something he won’t let on. The jerky camera cuts and the computer graphics backgrounds further help to make him larger than life and more unsteadying.
Long bits of this performance come before you even have to do anything as the player, and it’s not really something that rewards watching over and over. There are neat touches like getting an additional Lance interjection if you are taking too long to decide which vehicle you want to go out and destroy in, but it’s mostly fairly detached from what you’re doing as a player. And yet, being tied to any interactivity at all makes it take on a different flavour to just sitting and watching a film. You can’t ever quite forget that you might be needed to take action at any moment, that you are a student taking in information that you might be tested on, that you are sitting plugged into this world already. Lance Boyle is captivating in part because Lance Boyle as a game cutscene works better than Lance Boyle as a film ever could, and for all its other failures MegaRace at least takes full advantage of that.
PC CD-ROM chart, Edge 010, July 1994