It's a Saturday in August 2016, which means, for me, it's the perfect time to mess around with PS1 racing games, a group of games I find more fascinating than good, but enjoy playing just to look at how games used to be and explore the weird oddities that don't really exist in today's more polished video games.

Today I messed around with two titles: Hi-Octane: The Track Fights Back and Toy Story Racer. Both were picked up digitally on PS3 for under a buck during the big digital PS1 sale last year.

Hi-Octane: The Track Fights Back

Hi-Octane is a futuristic battle racer, in the vein of Wipeout, which came out on PlayStation a few months earlier.

This was a very early PlayStation game and oh boy does it show. Beyond the barely there presentation (The game has a menu straight out of the CD-I era, and while it has a good suite of options like single race, championship, racing a ghost, and battle mode, it makes no real attempt at story or even character) the graphics are bad and as far as I can tell there's only one music track, on a pretty short loop (despite being a CD game the ROM is only 35 megabytes). Most notably the draw distance is truly hideous, with the track blatantly popping into place about 100 feet in front of your car, far enough that you can generally navigate it okay, but giving the already unappealing graphics a very shoddy and unfinished feel.

The tracks themselves are all named after evocative locations like Shanghai or New Chernobyl, but lack distinctive features and all come off as "Generic Future Race Track #2" or GFRT #4. The cars are apparently lacking in textures and definitely lacking in character, with generic shapes like "big van" and "standard future car" mixing with only slightly more interesting fantasy vehicles like an X-Wing/Tie Fighter Interceptor hybrid.

How does it play? The controls are a bit floaty but not so bad that you can't get a handle on them after a few races. It's a combat racer, which means that you're often getting shot by machine guns from the back, and you need to worry about managing your shields, ammo, and fuel in addition to racing and collecting other power-ups, but the gameplay is neither notably good nor terrible. It's just a clunky early 3D racer. The AI is pretty bad, though, so it's not hard to pull off victories on some of the twistier courses where it gets caught up on corners.

A couple things worth noting. 1) You can turn the sky texture off and on in the options. I don't know why, though I suspect it has to do with 2) which is that this is a game by Bullfrog, and was on PC before being ported to Playstation (or maybe co-developed.) I suspect that helps explain the terrible draw-in (which might have been better on a PC) and perhaps the sky texture option, which might have helped with PC performance? Doesn't explain the single song soundtrack, though.

I never figured out why this game is subtitled "The Track Fights Back." The tracks do have some interesting elements to them, like shortcuts and areas to recharge shield or weapons, as well as hidden power ups, but I didn't find any hazards, and it's not like these were particularly new ideas. F-Zero (a MUCH better game) had shortcuts and shield recharge areas at the launch of the SNES.

Oh, and as far as I can tell there is no way to exit a race until all computer players have finished, which can take awhile. Overall Hi-Octane is a mildly interesting curiosity, but not something I can see a lot of people having really cared about, and a game that was rendered totally superfluous by the existence of Wipeout.

Toy Story Racer

Toy Story Racer, on the other hand, was a very late Playstation game, released in 2001 about 6 months after the launch of the PS2. It's a Mario Kart clone featuring the cast of Toy Story, from Buzz and Woody to Rex and Bo-Peep. What a difference a console life cycle makes! While Hi-Octane felt like a barely held together pile of code, Toy Story Racer features the rock solid graphics of late PS1 games, with much higher rez textures and some decent lighting effects. There's no real pop-in and the tracks are all very distinct and clear real world locations, while the racers all look great.

Toy Story Racer was made by Traveller's Tales and by 2001 they knew how to make a Playstation game. It features great presentation with voice clips from Toy Story, an interesting and vast progression system, lots of content, and awesome track fly throughs before you start each course. I couldn't find a way to turn the sky off, though.

The thing is, there's not much to say about Toy Story Racer. It's a very competent kart game with all that entails: including nice looking tracks with short cuts, power ups and weapons, and an Etch-A-Sketch that appears to point you in the right direction if you get off course. I'm sure a lot of kids have fond memories of playing the game when it was released, but it also launched onto a platform with a ton of games, many of which were better. Toy Story Racer is no Crash Team Racing, for example, and there are literally hundreds of other racing games for the PS1, almost all of which were released earlier. Playing it in 2016 it's just mildly entertaining, and not nearly as interesting as the weird and kind of broken Hi-Octane, which I spent more time with.

Overall

I had a decent time messing around with these two games. I enjoy looking back at the PS1 era, which to me is in many ways the worst but also most interesting era in gaming, and these two racing games provided decent bookends. Toy Story Racer is by far the better game, but there's something about Hi-Octane that gives it a shabby charm, like an old car with a mismatched door and big rust spots that seems held together with duct tape but somehow still runs. Would I recommend picking either up? Toy Story Racer might be worth a play if you're a huge fan of the movies, but even then you're better off just watching the trilogy and playing Mario Kart or CTR. Hi-Octane is a goddamned mess and I cannot recommend it for anything beyond a curiosity. I got my 96 cents worth of fun out of both of them, though, so if you are interested and see them super duper cheap I'm not going to try and stop you.

Until next time, I'll be here playing old Playstation games and wishing that I could turn the sky off during heat waves, or when it's heavily raining. Stupid real life should come with a fully featured options menu!