Just watching the intro was enough to take my breath away, despite it being poor even by the FMV standards of the day. I’d been wowed by all-new graphics, playing styles and worlds from the likes of Crash Bandicoot and Wipeout – and I’d quickly acclimatised to being absolutely shite at Destruction Derby 2 – so it was nice to settle into an old classic. Micro Machines V3 was the fifth game I got on my PlayStation back in early 1998. Until then, it’s important to understand V3’s unstoppable fall into relative obscurity. Given GameTripper’s rules, you’ll find out my opinion on it in five years, if it’s any good. It could revive the series, or bury it for good. This month, surprise reboot Micro Machines: World Series is coming to Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC.
Sadly, Codey never did properly return to the franchise, and three years later, the once-coveted Micro Machines was as good as dead. The drive to push boundaries forced even Codemasters to temporarily abandon its biggest hit to create completely new games to compete. It was all because of its developer’s proud approach to its IP, which led it to become one of the strongest, tightest racers to ever grace the console.īut the ever-expanding capabilities of the new hardware – which, to be fair, weren’t even scratched by V3 – presented constantly evolving possibilities for rival game makers, and V3 was soon forgotten in the franchise development frenzy of 1998.
Given the very-limited selection of games to enjoy Platinum status back in 1998, it’s still testament to Micro Machines V3 that it gained such accreditation within 12 months of release – and gamers who hadn’t already bought it, myself included, got a fantastic game for a truly accessible £20 price tag. With so many new intellectual properties – all being priced between £30 and £40 – you didn’t know what to go for without a subscription to Official PlayStation Magazine (which was biased) or its rivals (which didn’t give you demo discs). With Resident Evil, you lucked out, and with OverBlood, you were fucked off. You see, for every Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee, there was The Lost World: Jurassic Park. While it wasn’t all that special, it gave fans what they wanted, at a time when the console was still finding its feet. The inimitable tiny toy cars introduced themselves to Sony’s new hardware without compromising the principles that made the game series so popular in the first place. Micro Machines was one such game – it dominated the 16-bit generation with its simple core mechanics. The hardware restrictions – especially the jaggy-heavy graphics and limited colour scales – created bright, simple, fun and unforgettable experiences that are still as vivid now as they were in front of my eyes 20 years ago. It was one of the last titles before gamers started to develop near-impossibly-high standards that dominate reviews and forums today, when you don’t really hear the phrase “it isn’t great, but it’s good for a laugh”.Īfter V3’s much-feted released, blockbusters stepped up a gear – and dragged both developers and barely pubescent boys like me into a brave new world offered by the new, shiny PlayStation.īack when I was cutting my teeth on consoles in the 90s, games usually had maturity levels that matched my own. It is, however, the last blockbuster title of a time gone by, just before a dramatic wholesale shift in gaming’s maturity which effectively put happy-go-lucky games out to pasture. In fact, V3 wasn’t, and isn’t, a fantastic game by any stretch of the imagination. Besides, its appeal is rooted in the Mega Drive’s Micro Machines franchise, which is a story for another time. After two or three months of trying to capture the essence of why Micro Machines V3 was so amazing – writing, rewriting and starting afresh a dozen times or more – I realised it’s not about making a case for the game being all that great. Reader beware: this was the first review I attempted to write for GameTripper back in March, and I’ve only just managed to draw a line under it.
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