After Elite, Dizzy, Lemmings, Sensible Soccer, Worms, Wipeout, and Tomb Raider, CodeMasters’ Micro Machines is the final British game series Super Chart Island is going to cover to have been canonised by Royal Mail (Robocop blocked Populous from reaching #1 for the full set). Micro Machines stands out from that group, as from most, as the most nakedly commercial. It doesn’t just feature product placement, it is product placement. It’s a branded game of a toy. It’s whole identity comes from the scale models of cars produced by American company Galoob (who also have another video game association as makers of the plug-in game-modifying Game Genie!). You spend the entire game looking at these toys.
Within those confines, though, CodeMasters made a brilliant and inventive game which turned the top-down racer into a killer multiplayer game. How do you make clear that toys which are scale models of real cars are toys even as they race around? You put them on tables, floors and in various domestic settings, the standout idea which they run and run with, full of attention to detail. And rather than a split-screen race between two players or confining the action to a single fixed view, they made the multi-player into a kind of mobile sumo bout. You try to score points by removing your opponent from the ever-changing ring formed by the confines of the screen, dragging the camera along with you and pushing them off-course.
Micro Machines V3 takes the series into 3D, and in many senses it’s another game where that proves a dead end. Micro Machines works with a two dimensional view looking down on the track; anything else wouldn’t be Micro Machines. Another dimension can add very little, and indeed V3 was the last series entry to enjoy so much success. As the first one I’m encountering though, I’ll focus on the fact that it’s as fine a realisation of the idea as any. Its races round snooker tables, chemistry labs, garden ponds, restaurants and so on are great instant fun. The limited view of the track ahead means there’s an inevitable element of rote learning of tracks to avoid its tracks, but once you’re past that stage the cars feel brilliant to throw around. The big range of different handling vehicles and tracks means there’s a lot of depth in there for something so easy to pick up, too.
The weird thing about the whole set up is the fact that, while I talked about Super Skidmarks feeling like playing with toy cars, Micro Machines V3 really doesn’t. It’s a matter of perspective and distance, and it’s one area that 3D does actually help with. As the camera swoops around cartons and bottles and hugs close to the action, Micro Machines V3 feels more often like driving real cars, toys and boats in a surreal giant world. As deeply silly as it frequently is, its triumphs never feel miniature.
The buffeting conflict with other cars involved in racing is enjoyable even when they’re computer opponents, and it has a challenging but reasonable championship structure to take them on it. It’s helped by the fact that you are given the idea of racing against someone, with cars painted in bright colours corresponding with individual characters who provide as diverse an array of stereotypes as any fighting game. It’s so much more interesting than racing against faceless cars.
Multiplayer is obviously where it works best though. This was the same series that previously gave us a cartridge with controller ports built in for more players and encouraged two players to share each controller. I played it like that at a school friend’s party once and it was amazing chaos, which is where Micro Machines is almost always inevitably heading as soon as you get someone else involved. The series of short battles that make up a race provide so much space for back-and-forth and hilarious bids for revenge, successful or otherwise. So do the power-ups from forcefields to giant mallets, though they’re out of the way enough that the prospect of collecting them largely acts as a temptation into doing stupid things. That doesn’t make them any less fun, obviously. A couple of years ago I went to a retro games night at the Science Museum with my brother and his partner, and the three of us played Micro Machines V3 and its full mix of shared experience and rivalry came back to us right away.
