Townsmen Racing

If you go far enough back in the history of Nintendo you'll find something interesting: Mario didn't start out as a star. Rather, he had to work his way up from the bottom, literally, as the nameless chump in the seminal arcade blockbuster Donkey Kong.

Mario – named, as any gamer knows, after the landlord of Nintendo's American premises – went on to take centre stage in several seminal adventures of his own, of course. And once Mario was established as Nintendo's central mascot, eclipsing the primate star of his spot in the limelight, his world became fertile enough to produce secondary characters like Yoshi and Wario, both now pursuing lucrative solo careers. Repeatedly, Nintendo has shown that if you create a successful enough franchise, you can keep pulling out new games like handkerchiefs from a trick cuff.

Which, in effect, is what HandyGames is trying to do with Townsmen Racing. Much as Nintendo plucked the most recognisable characters from its stable for Super Mario Kart on the SNES, HandyGames has commandeered its own cast of pigs from the Townsmen sty and pitched them against one another in this surreal, yet ultimately rather sad, racer.

Like the strategy titles with which it shares its name, Townsmen Racer isn't short on detail and options. In Training mode, for instance, you get to not only choose the number of pigs you want to race against, but whether to race on any of the ten tracks or across country.

The choices continue when starting the main game, too. Three pigs, each possessing its own distribution of attributes from a range that includes strength, speed, and jumping ability, are offered for selection. Several more pigs can be unlocked – just as more powerful cars become available in most racing games – and supplementary to this you can furnish your pigs with power-ups, enabling them perform such feats as dropping flowers to distract opponents, defecating on the track to create a hazard, turning invisible or going berserk.

On the track you'll also find several obstacles, some of which contain random power-ups (not all of which assist you), some of which are destructible (depending on the strength of your pig) and some of which send you wheeling in the wrong direction.

If you crash too many times, your pig will fly into an ungovernable rage. Whilst this is happening, you can only sit back at and watch as its petulance costs you time. Irritating as this feature is, it makes you all the more determined to take care on the track and sharpen your technique.

And you'll need to get good because the only way to unlock new pigs and power-ups is to play the Tournament mode and earn points. With typical attention to detail, HandyGames gives out points for first, second, and third place, meaning that you're constantly saving up and making choices rather than simply obtaining a binary state of success or failure.

It all sounds cracking, doesn't it? Generous options, intricate detail, profound subtlety, colourful graphics, bouncing sound. On paper, it's a masterpiece. However, Townsmen Racing does have one significant problem.

It's not very good.

The pace is slow, the controls are confusing and unresponsive, and the tracks are linear to the point of violent coercion. What's worse, your pigs corner automatically, leaving you with little to do other than shuffle them left or right and attempt to jump over the obstacles that completely overcrowd the course.

And it's while you painstakingly negotiate the choked roadway that you come to realise that Townsmen Racing is barely a racing game at all. Far from resembling Mario Kart or Micro Machines, say, it feels like a cluttered Wario Ware mini-game that goes on for too long and almost instantly ceases to be much fun.

In capitalising on the success of Townsmen and branching into other genres, HandyGames has taken a valuable lesson from Nintendo: Go forth and multiply. Unfortunately, however, it's ignored Nintendo's most valuable piece of wisdom: quality control is all.