Cars Mater-National
|
DS
| Cars Mater-National

Never mind Jack Frost or the bogeyman. Forget about pied pipers from Hamelin or anywhere else. You can even put the childcatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang from your mind, because the greatest obstacle between birth and the far shore of adulthood isn't monsters, hypnotic musicians, or degenerates, but the seemingly innocuous car.

Given that these machines pluck so many of our young from this earth, it seems an odd choice by Disney to produce a film all about how much fun it is to drive fast, but there you go. As it happens, Cars was a perfectly respectable movie, and it inevitably generated a DS game.

Unfortunately, it was mediocre, and so Tantalus Interactive is seeking to address the problems of the first with the oddly named Mater-National. In place of the stylus-friendly mini-games of its predecessor is racing, pure and simple.

You begin in control of the film's irrepressible star, Lighting McQueen, a boxster-esque sports car with an unquenchable thirst for velocity. The premise of the game is that Mater, a pickup truck, has set up a 17 race competition, across 14 different courses, to celebrate the opening of McQueen's new stadium in Radiator Springs.

Each of the races contains three vast laps that feature stretches of straight road, winding hair-pins, and sly short-cuts. The settings themselves are diverse, including mountains, towns, deserts, farmland, caverns, and a green night-vision underground race.

There's a great sense of scale, with details like waterfalls and retreating fields filling the middle and far distance, and although pop-up (solid objects suddenly appearing in front of you) is high, the animation is smooth and the graphics are for the most part excellent, both in-game and during the camaraderie-laden cut-scenes.

As you'd expect, there's more to the driving than simply going fast on a road. Stretches of concrete fall away as the field thunders across them, trees collapse across the road, opening up alternate routes that you have to find on the fly, and boulders fall out of the sky.

In several of the races there are shortcuts, and in a few of these it's possible to collect giant gold coins that unlock, amongst other things, one of nine extra characters like Lizzie, an ancient but curiously competitive Model T Ford, and Flo, an American muscle car complete with glinting tail fins.

In light of this, it's impossible to deny that Mater-National belongs in some extent to the console cart-racer stable. However, it would be a disservice to dismiss this game as such, because it's actually a rather good arcade racer as well - closer in spirit to multi-platform classics like Ridge Racer and Burnout than Mario Kart DS.

The vehicle handling is perhaps a little bit papery, but the controls are responsive and the power-slide system very well implemented. You execute a slide by pressing B whilst holding down A to accelerate, and while abandoning yourself to the chaos of drift takes some mastering, it pays off by letting you boost.

Whenever you skid, a little juice is added to the boost meter in the bottom right of the screen, and once it reaches a certain level you can press X to momentarily accelerate away from the pack. Power-sliding is tricky, so at first the benefit of chasing boosts is likely outweighed by the time you've spent slamming into walls or plummeting off cliffs, but as you develop finesse it starts to pay off.

Mater-National's difficulty curve is slightly on the soft side, but as you reach the last races or try to complete the various against-the-clock and elimination tasks in Challenge mode it becomes much tougher. So while a competent gamer will probably complete the Mater-National in a long day, the various collectable coins and challenges means there's plenty of meat left over on the bone for completists to gnaw on.

Of course, it's a kids' game, and there's the argument to be made that tired eyes such as our own can never really give a fair account. In the spirit of absolute fairness, then, it's worth pointing out that when this critic was back at home, his young nephew stole the cart for several days before finally announcing, with the pomposity of a critic in training, "you should give this one a good mark."

And while we don't take orders from children, you're entitled to know what one thinks.

Cars Mater-National

Cars Mater-National is a strange beast. Not quite a Mario Kart DS clone, not quite a serious racer, it succeeds by revving the better parts of both
Score
Rob Hearn
Rob Hearn
Having obtained a distinguished education, Rob became Steel Media's managing editor, now he's no longer here though.