M25 Racer, or London Racer, or whatever else it was called when you lifted it out of the bargain bin and wondered whether to gamble an amount of money on it being kind of OK, money which could have bought you three cheap pints and a kebab instead because it was 1999 and we hadn't invented inflation yet.
I did not have three cheap pints or a kebab before coming up with the idea to review the game while travelling around the road which inspired it, and I'm not sure that's a good thing to admit. Will I be able to assemble some kind of vaguely coherent review with no script, no opportunity to factcheck, one of the worst sound recording environments available, a strict geographyimposed time limit and the need to, at some point, concentrate on the actual driving? In theory the presence of this video should make that a foregone conclusion but... well, it's Timberwolf.
Junctions:
0:00 Start your engines
1:42 The bit where I actually start talking about the game
2:40 Davilex and that
3:31 Kind of OK
5:58 Gameplay progression
7:28 German car warfare and the case for budget games
8:34 Problems arise
9:49 Wait, that was it, success, why are there three minutes left?
10:35 Wheelbarrows
11:52 Who needs Top Gear anyway?
12:49 A quantity of fun
Images from Pexels, MobyGames and iStock (paid)
Some public domain content from Wikimedia Commons
I completely stole that "Cybermorph is a reference 1 fun" thing from @NikkiandBunty and their community because I am a deeply unoriginal human being. Also I enjoy confusing references that make sense to a grand total of about 39 people.
Bonus fact: although I tag 1999 as the point where hardware acceleration became enough of a norm games started being designed around it, being a budgetconscious title this does feature software rendering modes, down to a rather grainy 320x240 if you're running it on something already past its best.
Tech note: while London Racer received a few XP patches and the like, M25 Racer has suffered the march of time and really doesn't run well on modern systems, tending to exhibit timing issues and missing textures even with dgVoodoo 2 in use. Thankfully, modern computers are fast enough for PCem to be able to emulate a sufficiently fast Windows 98 system complete with periodcorrect Voodoo 2, which is how I captured the game footage here.
#m25racer