#50: Top Gear

Not the UK show.

How could a game called Top Gear be anything but a racing game? The game opened with lots of track selection and difficulty options I couldn't use because you need a password to unlock the later stuff. I was stuck racing in Vegas, presumably on a real track.

Pitstop? Is that you?

The game itself had a very questionable control scheme. Manual gear shifting is annoying but I understand why they put it into games. My big problem is that the #1 button on the controller, the B button, went unused. And the accelerator button was actually X! The least used button in most games was the button I had to hold down! My thumb does not have the muscle memory to do that properly.

FAILURE!

I thought I did a reasonable job in my first race. Especially since I used up 2 of my 3 nitro boosts early on when I was trying to figure out the controls. The game starts you at the back of a pack of 20 cars and I managed to make it all the way up to 8th. The game then awarded points to the top 10 of 20 finishers (I earned 3 points for 8th) and followed that up with a game over screen. WHAT? How are you giving me race series points and then saying I didn't finish high enough to keep playing. Why is 8th worth 3 points if 8th is also a DQ?

The music was annoying. The game was not very interesting. The controls sucked, and the scoring system was flawed. There's pretty much nothing good going on with this game that I can see, except maybe if all the tracks were real tracks. That might be pretty cool if I was a racing fan. But I'm not, so I don't care.

Rating: D-