A bit ago I was thinking on my term "Car Game", which is a licensed racing game with no characters or real life people to sell you on it. Completely faceless, but we've got real cars! They tend to be the biggest cheapo shelf filler garbage you could find, the type of stuff I would buy for a dollar at my game store just to swap out the CD case art with something that's actually worthwhile, like Oddworld Abe's Odyssey or M&M's Shell Shocked.

I did think of one game though that's probably a subversion, and it was this one which I actually rented a decent amount back in the day. Beetle Adventure Racing (BAR!) is kinda like what would happen if you had a racing game crash into a Rare collectathon at the speed of light, resulting in ginormous tracks with a bunch of crates you hit for points. The points iirc are mostly used for continues during the championship races, but you also unlock a Beetle Battle Arena for grabbing all 100 points worth of them in a track in one race. There's also these flower crates you can find on the tracks which are pretty well-hidden, and they actually don't appear until you find the original one on Coventry Cove that's hidden in a random haystack outside a barn. I believe you unlock cheats in the cheat menu for each one, which I think is a cool and creative way to do such a thing. I wonder if anyone would've even found it without a guide, or by complete accident and wonder why the announcer randomly went "Groooooovy!".

I know I just bored you to death with all of that generic describing, but I'm more or less explaining what the "Adventure" part of BAR(!) is. After all, this isn't some Ford-ass racing sim, it's BAR! An adventure with some punch buggies!

punches you in the arm

No punch backs! Christ, do people even do that anymore? My mom was the only one who did it to me. Regardless!

The game is pretty darn fun, the Beetles drive pretty well with some meaty weight to them, and the tracks like I said are huge and most of them are designed rather well with a crapton of shortcuts to find. Unfortunately, I feel like the game's tracks peak pretty early. Coventry Cove is a good starting track, Mount Mayhem is awesome, and Inferno Isle is a neat Jurassic Park track. Sunset Sands and Metro Madness put me to sleep though, and Wicked Woods' potential for being the scary Halloween track I feel is a bit squandered by it being the shortest track in the game. Best of luck getting to see Wicked Woods too, because this game's CPU is absolutely woeful starting at Professional Championship, it's sad that I feel like needing to recommend using gameshark codes or a save file. "If the CPU is gonna be a cheaty bastard, then so shall I!" as I always say. The music's also a bit too on the laidback side imo and some are pretty repetitive, though I still really like the Mount Mayhem music.

I feel like I soured a teensy bit on BAR(!), but it's still a very fun racer on N64. I'm also a bit on edge about the fact that the cop car Beetle is the last unlock and that it's horrifically OP. You can blare the siren and make the CPU cars stop in their tracks and commit police brutality on them by ramming them into a bajillion pieces. Horrifying!

The multiplayer does look pretty fun though, shame no one wants to play with me despite having three controllers. One of these days....by the way, for a while I wondered what those helicopters on Mount Mayhem were looking for. It was apparently the UFO hidden in the cave underneath the first bridge. I dunno, I thought that was super cool back then, still do.

BAR!