Hard Drivin's douchebag cousin who likes to blare their mainstream mediocrity to let everyone know they paid too much for their sound system.
Making the comparison may feel forced due to me recently referencing Hard Drivin' within the last week, but Club Drive's graphics feel like they were stolen straight from it, and often the stages feel like deleted assets like the recreation of Jerome's house which could've been made for a laugh while the lads were on coffee break. For a Jaguar game I feel they could've done a bit better and at least attempt to use textures, although the frame rate at least runs better than Hard Drivin' or Twisted Metal 4 while playing on the Oil Rig stage. It's actually not that big of an accomplishment I'm afraid to say.
The driving itself is kind of okay-ish coming off of Checkered Flag, but the sense of speed is not fulfilled and it leaves the "collect the stuff" mode that the game happily starts you on in the menu feeling like more of a chore than trying to rotate a california king mattress by your lonesome. There's an option for "fast", but it makes your car terrible to control and it's absolutely not worth the trade. I actually had the most fun with this via taking screenshots and utilizing the different camera angles than playing it as intended, which probably isn't a good thing. The entire thing reeks of tech demo, which is pretty insulting when it came out a year after the launch of the system. What a game to excite people for the holidays. Fuck Donkey Kong Country, you want Club Drive.
If there's one thing I need to mention it's the absolutely pathetic soundtrack, this music in particular sounds like they got someone to blow raspberries into a mic and call it a day. It's been a while since I had to add to my goofy ass music list, but it deserves to be within breathing distance of the trash GnR cover in Mega Man X3 and the Zany Golf theme that sounds like a child on five cans of MT Dew Code Red went ballistic on the 88 keys. It feels harsh, but I rule the goofy ass music list with an iron fist, and if you so much as annoy me at the slightest I will not hesitate to throw you on the same bench as the cacophonic tone-deaf cats from Grandia III.
Scrub Drive
Making the comparison may feel forced due to me recently referencing Hard Drivin' within the last week, but Club Drive's graphics feel like they were stolen straight from it, and often the stages feel like deleted assets like the recreation of Jerome's house which could've been made for a laugh while the lads were on coffee break. For a Jaguar game I feel they could've done a bit better and at least attempt to use textures, although the frame rate at least runs better than Hard Drivin' or Twisted Metal 4 while playing on the Oil Rig stage. It's actually not that big of an accomplishment I'm afraid to say.
The driving itself is kind of okay-ish coming off of Checkered Flag, but the sense of speed is not fulfilled and it leaves the "collect the stuff" mode that the game happily starts you on in the menu feeling like more of a chore than trying to rotate a california king mattress by your lonesome. There's an option for "fast", but it makes your car terrible to control and it's absolutely not worth the trade. I actually had the most fun with this via taking screenshots and utilizing the different camera angles than playing it as intended, which probably isn't a good thing. The entire thing reeks of tech demo, which is pretty insulting when it came out a year after the launch of the system. What a game to excite people for the holidays. Fuck Donkey Kong Country, you want Club Drive.
If there's one thing I need to mention it's the absolutely pathetic soundtrack, this music in particular sounds like they got someone to blow raspberries into a mic and call it a day. It's been a while since I had to add to my goofy ass music list, but it deserves to be within breathing distance of the trash GnR cover in Mega Man X3 and the Zany Golf theme that sounds like a child on five cans of MT Dew Code Red went ballistic on the 88 keys. It feels harsh, but I rule the goofy ass music list with an iron fist, and if you so much as annoy me at the slightest I will not hesitate to throw you on the same bench as the cacophonic tone-deaf cats from Grandia III.
Scrub Drive
3 Comments
Seeing you tackle the Jaguar library - both as an onlooker and recently following you - has been a fascinating journey. It seems like this isn't a PCFX or 3DO case where it does have the influence and potential to obtain a cult classic niche, but just a dime-a-dozen 'cutting edge' trend chaser that occasionally had some good stuff available. Whether that's just the dev studios mudding it up or Atari's lack of control and maintenance is a mystery though.
@bran yeah, they're full of shit.
@blaz the system itself is kind of a hodgepodge of garbage working to somehow obtain 64-bit graphics, Atari's consoles were never the best especially after the 5200 controller was apparently so shit it sometimes wouldn't even work right out of the box. I haven't even gotten to Jaguar CD games, and that hardware has an infamously terrible failure rate that makes the PS1 look like it was made of Nintendium.
It's just a very interesting little project of mine to look at all the non-ports for it, because most of the better games on it are just things like Doom, Wolfenstein, etc. That stuff's boring to me, though I'm kinda morbidly curious about the Raiden port and why it's on Jaguar of all things.
@blaz the system itself is kind of a hodgepodge of garbage working to somehow obtain 64-bit graphics, Atari's consoles were never the best especially after the 5200 controller was apparently so shit it sometimes wouldn't even work right out of the box. I haven't even gotten to Jaguar CD games, and that hardware has an infamously terrible failure rate that makes the PS1 look like it was made of Nintendium.
It's just a very interesting little project of mine to look at all the non-ports for it, because most of the better games on it are just things like Doom, Wolfenstein, etc. That stuff's boring to me, though I'm kinda morbidly curious about the Raiden port and why it's on Jaguar of all things.
HylianBran
1 year ago