Over 40,000 people die every year in the United States in car accidents. That’s just a little over 100 people per day. And yet, somehow, people remain fascinated by cars and racing and the site of two cars smashing into one another like metal behemoths at war. I suppose it should come as no surprise that exaggerated forms of vehicular combat feature in many video games.
Introduction:
The genre is firmly rooted in cinema, and many of the films featuring car combat reside firmly in the B-movie and cult movie class. In as much as any movie can be said to have founded the genre, Death Race 2000 is the likely culprit. By the year 2000, the U.S. is controlled by a fascist government that pacifies the masses with bloody gladiator combat… in cars. It’s similar to Rollerball in that respect. Except it features David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone, which is, to be frank, awesome.
Of course, the movie series that really popularized the genre was Mad Max. Nothing like a young Mel Gibson’s good looks to instill life into a genre. The sequel, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, sent Gibson’s celebrity stock soaring. It remains one of those rare science fiction movies upon which critical acclaim is heaped. It not only helped define the car combat genre but also helped define the post-apocalyptic landscape.
The video game industry, always one to crib notes from Hollywood, has tapped into this science fiction-based genre a number of times.
Twisted Metal (1995):
An early work of David Jaffe, he of God of War fame, the Twisted Metal series is an exuberant, no-hold-barred take on combat between cars. It does not sugar coat the concept behind the game. Simply put: players are contestants in a demolition derby tournament with all sorts of fun weapons. In addition to the usual crash and destroy method of attack, each character has special attacks including such colorful favorites as Tazers, Crushing Tires, Death Spawn (a screeching soul wielded by the Grim Reaper), and Napalm Cones (flaming ice cream cones–what else?).
Chances are, if you walked into a house with a PSX, you saw this game lying alongside the machine. In contrast with the bubbly, airy feel of Nintendo, Sony debuted a system aimed at mature audiences, and Twisted Metal helped cement that reputation. It was one of the early entries in the Sony Greatest Hits program. To this day, it’s the longest running Sony exclusive franchise, and seven of the games from the series have been re-released as Greatest Hits.
Sweet Tooth, the killer clown who appears in each release of the series, is one of the iconic figures for the PlayStation and is frequently featured in advertising.
The original game sold 1.46 million copies on the upstart console, and the series has gone on to sell over 8.53 million copies according to some figures. The series fares well in reviews with Twisted Metal: Black performing the best with a Metacritic rating of 91. Fans are eagerly awaiting the next installment for the PlayStation 3.
Carmageddon (1997):
Ever the province of violent games, the PC features one of the noteworthy games in the oeuvre. Carmageddon was developed originally as 3D Destruction Derby, but gameplay elements were changed, and a few licenses were acquired. Or acquired and then lost and then acquired and the lost. Namely: the license for Mad Max and then the license for a cult classic called Death Race 2000. Neither license worked out, so SCi released with a license and with a colorful neologism too.
At its core, it’s a racing game but with an increased focus on destroying other cars. The usual elements of a racing game are in place with tracks and checkpoints and the like, but players can increase the amount of time they have to complete the course through certain… accomplishments. Like killing pedestrians for one thing. Brilliant, I say. Way to give people incentive. I’d say I wish there were a reason to kill pedestrians in GTA games, but I think catharsis is quite enough reason for me.
The original sold 117,228 copies, which wasn’t so bad back in the day, apparently, because it had a few sequels. Honestly, it was never my cup of tea. I don’t even like tea.
Much to the consternation of the few stalwart fans of the series, Eidos recently announced the cancellation of Carmageddon 4. Whether it spells the doom or the franchise or merely is one more chapter in Eidos’ financial troubles, only time will tell.
Auto Assault (2006):
Epic fail! Let me just get that out of the way. I’ll be returning to it later.
Auto Assault was an MMO developed by NetDevil and published by NCSoft. It centered entirely around vehicular combat in a dystopian future. Players choose between three factions: humans, mutants, and biomeks. Pretty much your standard post-apocalyptic scenario in which aliens contaminate the world creating hideous mutants forcing the humans to nuke the entire planet and hide underground for a few centuries. Somewhere in there, biomeks, a catchy way of saying cyborg, are created, but I don’t think it’s really important where or when they’re created.
There were two modes in the game: town mode and car mode. In town mode, the player walked around town buying upgrades and chatting with people. In car mode, they drove around slaughtering the innocent and feasting on their blood. Or… something to that effect. Mostly they just smashed and shot up other cars. Depending on what area of the game the player was in, those other cars could just be NPCs or they could be other players. Unfortunately, the game was pretty much a desolate wasteland in terms of players. On August 31, 2007, the servers were all shutdown due to a lack of sufficient subscriptions. The game survived just over a year before NCSoft wiped their hands of it.
The Metacritic rating was a fair 72, but that just wasn’t good enough to keep gamers interested.
Super Mario Kart (1992):
With all of the other games featuring the usual bland environments (interesting in their own, emo sort of way, of course), I thought I’d also feature one of the most successful racing games of all time that happens to include sanitized car combat. Okay, kart combat. The point remains that Super Mario Kart was at the forefront of this cutting edge genre.
Believe it or not, for those who didn’t bask in the original glory of this game, the graphics were serious stuff when it was released. It featured Mode 7 texture mapping, which greatly enhanced the background graphics of the game. Aside from knowing that it’s associated with the background, I couldn’t really give you an explanation of why it’s all fancy, but it was used by a lot of Square titles, and we all know how much of a Square fanboy I am.
Although there was also a special battle mode in which players tried to knock balloons off the karts of their opponents, the combat is deeply integrated into the racing as well. Think of it as Carmageddon but without the angst. And some banana peels, bouncing koopa shells, and invincibility stars. The penalty for being hit by any of these items is generally only a few seconds spent spinning out, although occasionally the player can get knocked off the track until a kind lakitu hauls the kart back onto the stage. This small penalty encourages a bit of recklessness in the players, and the general frenetic pace of the races with items flying every which way provides that yelping party game feel. While the single player is enjoyable, nothing is quite as fun as playing with three of your closest friends and using the sort of expletives that Nintendo would never award the Seal of Approval to.
Widely considered one of the greatest games of all time with an much-anticipated edition due out on the Wii, Super Mario Kart sold over 8 million copies. Hell, even the GBA edition sold over 5 million. In fact, the entire franchise has sold over 41 million copies. It’s just like printing money.
Conclusion:
All of this is not to say that car combat in games has gone the way of the dodo–I enjoy using phrases that make me sound like an 80-year-old on his porch swing–but that games focused entirely on car combat are perhaps a dying breed. While GTA IV does incorporate cars into the battle mechanics, they are not the central element of combat. No longer will men roam the dusty streets of a post-apocalyptic landscape in beaten up Trans Ams covered in spikes and barbed wire. It just isn’t enough. If you offer a player those open highways, they will want to stop, admire the scenery, kill a few people with a shotgun or two, maybe race a bit too. Always more. Even Mario Kart holds on mostly through the strength of its franchise, which is how Twisted Metal maintains its position as top dog in the genre of true vehicular combat.
In the end, it just isn’t enough. After you’ve killed one car with deadly turrets, you’ve killed them all. Apparently, there can be only one.
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