Showing posts with label Toy Racer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Toy Racer. Show all posts

5 Dreamcast Racers Which Didn't Quite Make the Podium

There is no shortage of 'best racing games' lists for the Dreamcast - a system which had some of the most critically acclaimed racing games of the early 00’s. Everyone knows just how good Dreamcast classics like Metropolis Street Racer, Daytona USA, Sega Rally and Ferrari F355 Challenge were. Absolutely fantastic driving games that really did move the genre forward in their own way, and games that as a Dreamcast fan reading this article, you’ve probably spent many hours playing.

As you should know by now, here at the Junkyard we like to think outside of the box a little. So here we go, then. In no particular order, I present to you my alternative top five Dreamcast racers that you might not have played yet:

Tokyo Highway Challenge / Tokyo Extreme Racer
Released for the PAL launch (and confusingly called something different in every territory - Tokyo Extreme Racer and Shutokou Battle in the US and Japan respectively), Tokyo Highway Challenge is a game that I rented plenty of times when I was younger and have since put many hours into. I think it’s one of the most underrated racing games on the system and thanks to its evening setting, it still looks fantastic when played today in a smooth 60fps.
Tokyo Highway Challenge sees us buying cars, tuning them up and taking to the Japanese highways to challenge other hoons in a race for cash. Each other driver belongs to a gang, and when you’ve beaten all drivers in a particular gang, you get to face off against their leader.
It’s all a bit like a 'racing fighting game' where all races are 1v1 and you have an energy bar at the top of the screen. Whoever is behind on the road starts to see their energy bar deplete, ticking down faster as the gap between first and second increases. A simple concept but a refreshing one for those who don’t want to race lap after lap.
The biggest criticism of the game is a well noted one - just one 'track,' which itself isn’t particularly big, even though you do get the option of racing in either direction around the highway loop. Nevertheless, the tuning and upgrade system is fantastic and an essential part of the game. As you get further in, your tuning skills will make the difference between winning battles or not, regardless of how well you can drive!

Toy Racer Retrospective: Dreamcast Online Gaming

If you ask most Dreamcast fans what their favourite games are on the system, it’s not unusual to hear things like Soul Calibur, Sonic Adventure, Phantasy Star Online, Crazy Taxi, and so forth. One answer you don’t hear very often is Toy Racer; a budget Toy Commander spin-off focusing primarily on online multiplayer racing.

For me, Toy Racer is one of my favourite and easily most played Dreamcast titles - not because it’s necessarily a fantastic game - but because it genuinely changed the way I enjoyed video games forever by fully opening my eyes to the world of online gaming.
Released in 2000, Toy Racer was developed by No Cliché and published by Sega themselves. It only ever saw the light of day on store shelves in Europe, as a planned US release never ultimately materialised. Toy Racer enjoyed chart topping success in the UK thanks mostly to its insanely budget price of just £5 (approx $6-7 today, but more like $3-4 back then) - the same price as a Dreamcast demo disc - and this was certainly a huge reason why I took a gamble back in the day.
Being a student at the time, new gaming purchases were a rare occurrence. But how could I resist at such a low price for a new racing game promising endless multiplayer fun!  Up until this point, I’d been intrigued by online gaming but had never really invested any significant time into it. I didn’t own a gaming PC and my free copy of Chu Chu Rocket (thanks to being an early sign-up to the Dreamarena) didn’t really have any lasting appeal for me beyond the initial novelty of playing against other real people via the power of the internet...

Toy Racer Multiplayer Back Online Through Dial-Up

Remember Toy Racer? Of course you do - we only mentioned it a few days ago in this post about the work of two highly talented individuals working to get our trusty old Dreamcasts back online. There's a chance you've just clicked on this because someone's retweeted it or shared it on Facebook though, so I'll explain. Toy Racer was a PAL-only spin-off from Toy Commander that featured toy cars being raced around various tracks that were constructed from bits of Scalextric and broken stickle bricks. It was intended as a budget multiplayer racer to demonstrate the Dreamcast's online capabilities and for the most part it fulfilled its role amicably...until Sega's European servers were smashed to bits and thrown into a landfill. And then pissed on by several tramps.
The good news is that Toy Racer is now back online. And while we've told you this before, this time you don't need any other additional bits and bobs to experience it. All you need is a Dreamcast and a phone line. And Toy Racer, obvs. Plug it in with the standard modem cable and point your DNS at 46.101.91.123. Viola! Toy Racer is back online via dial up...right now!

Dreamarena Authentication Cracked, Quake III Arena & Toy Racer To Be Playable Online Via Dial-Up

 
If you're a European Dreamcast owner and had a system back in the day, you'll no doubt be familiar with Dreamarena. For those who don't know, Dreamarena was the online portal that PAL Dreamcasts would connect to when you wanted to go online; and many games used the service to authenticate your details when you wanted to play multiplayer games via the 33k modem attached like a disgusting carbuncle to the European system. I have fond memories of Dreamarena as it was the first thing I saw whenever I wanted to go online and browse the internet looking for cheats and...erm...the latest news from the international stock markets. Yeah, stock markets. Um.
Was it the Bismarck? Couldn't help myself, sorry.
One thing I don't have fond memories of is that horrendous 'disconnected' sound that used to play as soon as the connection dropped out. That, and the ominous noise of my mother booming up the stairs to see if I was online without permission again. Anyway, that's all irrelevant - this post is about the awesome news that many people (including me) never thought they'd hear: Dreamarena authentication has been cracked and will allow you to once again hook your Dreamcast up to your phone line and, using nothing more than the bundled dial-up modem, play both Quake III Arena and Toy Racer with other people. This isn't an April Fools.

An Interesting Toy Racer Easter Egg

Our good friend Pcwzrd13 has been up to his usual tricks - creating extremely decent Dreamcast-related video content. Unfortunately, it's not the latest in the Games That Never Were series (although rest assured, it's coming soon!); but rejoice in the fact that it's the revelation of a hitherto never before seen easter egg involving Toy Racer and that other No Cliché vapourware title, Agartha. Sadly, Agartha never really amounted to much more than a video of a bloke with a beard wandering around in the snow...and anyone can see that by hanging around the local bus station on a particularly cold Thursday morning. However, that won't that deter us. Behold:

Toy Racer Dial-Up Connection In The Works

You may have read recently that the online-only multiplayer title Toy Racer is the latest Deamcast game to be dragged out from under a rock and plonked back onto the interwebs (or whatever it's called). And you'd have read right. The Junkyard was recently contacted by Bob Dobbs, a member of the popular Dreamcast-Talk forums, who confirmed that the game's servers are well and truly back online and running well. Unfortunately for most of us, you can only get your online fix of Toy Racer if you own a highly sought-after and expensive broadband adaptor for your Dreamcast, but those clever chaps are also working on a method that will allow you to hook up via your trusty old 33k (56k in the US) dial-up modem. Huzzah! Here's an info-burst from the man himself:

Dreamcast-Talk (International) & Dreamcast-br (Brazil) has yet another game back online. This one is Toy Racer. For the first time, the original game server software has been released (thanks to petter3k who contacted No Cliche, the programmers of Toy Racer). Dreamcast-br has already had a server running, but we do not know if their server is the original or not (Igor Isaias Banlian was kind enough to allow us the IP addy to play). In both cases, the game only connects via BBA (dial-up wants to go to Dreamarena). Currently, DC-Talk is working on a boot-disc to allow the game GD-ROM to use dial-up.

To note, DC-Talk was where the "Netopia" method of connecting your DC to the internet without a PC of any kind. It has much less latency than the troublesome DC-PC server set-up. I use it, which is purely hardware driven (developed by brourke228). The other is the and the PC-DC windows/VMware server portion to work with the Ryochan Linux PC-DC server method (brourke228 of DC-Talk developed the Windows portion).

Here's the science bit:
Brazil IP: 200.165.140.20:2048
TCP Port: 2048
UDP Port: 2049


As stated, the guys at Dreamcast-Talk are working on a boot-disc to get Dreamcast gamers up and running with a dial-up connection, and are currently ironing out some issues with the remnants of Dream Arena at present. For a full guide on how to get online with Toy Racer right now though, follow this link; and be sure to check the DreamcastBr Facebook group for further updates.

Battery Powered Face-Off

I remember being obsessed with RC cars back in my more formative years. At least 3 Christmases that I can remember were spent in a freezing back yard, remotely guiding a shiny new vehicle around a variety of hastily knocked together circuits where discarded bricks and piles of old twigs were quickly refashioned into crash barriers, bustling pit lanes and towering grandstands full of roaring race-goers. Halcyon days indeed...apart from the one Christmas when I got a Tyco Traxx that broke after about 10 minutes of rallying it over some mud. Or the time my brother drove another car off a ramp on the edge of kitchen table at full speed with every intention of inflicting maximum damage. A mission which was completed with IMF-style efficiency, I hasten to add. Over time though, the fascination slowly dwindled and the batteries that were once gobbled up by said plastic vehicles were snatched by a plethora of power-hungry handheld gaming devices...and the rest is history.

Moving swiftly on (but getting slower and slower as the batteries drain), racing games and the Dreamcast go hand in hand. Or should that be controller/race wheel in hand? Probably - nay, most definitely - an irrelevance when we're dealing with multiple impenetrable layers of metaphor, but the fact of the matter remains: the Dreamcast has some absolutely stonking racing titles. As I mentioned in the not-too-distant past, pretty much every genre is catered for on Sega's little beige/yellow lozenge of joy. There are arcade racers aplenty; more serious simulations; cartoony kart 'em ups (quite literally when you consider Wacky Races and Looney Tunes Space Race); and even a couple of lovely Formula 1 games if that's your particular bag of choice.

But what if you're after a link to the past (heh) as I am? What if you want to re-live those bygone days (aka last Wednesday) standing wellington-clad in a puddle and whizzing your little toy car around? What are your options other than going to Argos and y'know, just buying an actual RC car? Well, while it's not strictly true that the RC racer has completely vanished from our consoles and PC monitors - just look at Motor Storm RC and Table Top Racing on the PS Vita, the Choro Q series, and RC Mini Racers on iPad/Mac - the RC racer is not a genre that has been very prominent on the modern systems. Any by modern systems, I mean the Xbox 360, PS3, Wii and their respective successors. The Dreamcast though, has no less than three of the little blighters. How do they compare to playing with the real thing? And more importantly, how do they compare to each other? Read on to find out, Mon'Amie...

Toy Racer
This is by far the easiest of the three games to investigate, simply because there is so little to actually investigate. Toy Racer was a spin-off from Toy Commander that utilised many of the aforementioned game's assets to create an online-only, four player racer that was designed to pique interest in the Dreamcast's internet functionality. It may be a little unfair to include Toy Racer in this little list as it isn't a full blown game - playing it today is an unsatisfying experience to say the least, especially as there are only four tracks and no AI competitors in races. Naturally, back when the Dreamcast was still in the picture, Toy Racer's complement of adversaries would have comprised other human beings logged in through Dream Arena (all six billion of them) and the main premise was to beat the other humans playing on their Dreamcasts around Europe.
Alas, today it is a rather singular experience as No Cliche decided, no doubt at Sega's behest, to include exactly zero in the way of a single player experience. All you can do nowadays is race around the 4 oddly-designed tracks on your own, picking up turbos and missiles and firing them at nobody in particular. I can imagine Toy Racer could have been quite fun with other players, seeing as the handling model of Toy Commander has been replaced with a much more user-friendly one. Vehicles all handle very well and have a really nice centrifugal suspension effect where they lean to one side as you slide around corners. Visually it is very rudimentary, and the tracks (again, of which there are only four) are all comprised of assets from the main Toy Commander engine...so you have a loose kitchen-based one, a bedroom based one etc etc. If No Cliche had fleshed Toy Racer out and turned it into a proper game rather than an 'online only' sideshow, this could have been one of the Dreamcast's hidden gems. As is...give it a whirl if you find it cheap (you will).

ReVolt
Originally an N64 cart, ReVolt is probably the only title many gamers will associate with RC racing. Developed and published by defunct outfit Acclaim, ReVolt was one of the N64's most highly respected racers and the inclusion of a hi-res Expansion Pak mode meant it was also one of the system's best looking games. I first played ReVolt on the Nintendo platform and remember buying the Dreamcast port simply to see if it was any better...and I have to admit that while I was sceptical as to whether there would be any improvement, I was pleasantly surprised to find a game that far surpassed it's predesessor. Not that the Dreamcast version of ReVolt is a sequel as such - it's basically the same game but with vastly improved visuals, vehicle handling and an extra environment thrown in for good measure. It's quite interesting now that I think about it - there is a lot of outcry currently about games being re-released on the PS4 and Xbox One that are simply the same games as found on the last gen systems but with a lick of graphical paint (see Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition)...yet it was going on in the Dreamcast/N64/PS1 era too, and ReVolt is a perfect example.

But what of the game itself? Well, ReVolt is a racer in which you get to drive an RC car around a multitude of circuits against other vehicles. As is the norm in this style of game, you can collect weapons to use against the other racers and these range from fireworks to bowling balls. The best bit about ReVolt though, is that all the circuits are based in locations where it would actually be fun to race RC cars. There's a neighbourhood - complete with sections that go through living rooms and under parked cars and through sewer pipes; a supermarket; a museum, and even a toy shop. The Dreamcast port also had an exclusive 'roof tops' environment that saw racers battle for pole position atop a cluster of skyscrapers. Elsewhere, ReVolt featured a fairly comprehensive career mode where it was possible to unlock new classes where you could graduate from battery powered models to petrol engined vehicles, and also a full-on track designer. It had some great music too. ReVolt is a great game and is also fairly cheap to get hold of these days, so if you're new to Dreamcast collecting it'd be a shame to miss out on this game.

Stunt GP
Another game released by a masterful development house of yesteryear, Team17's Stunt GP is the ying to ReVolt's yang. While it still (obviously) features RC cars, this title limits the races to the professional style where everything is conducted on purpose-built tracks. There is no straying off the beaten track here, my friend: even though there are multiple countries to race in, there is a definite air that you are taking part in an RC race - the track is laid out and you must race the way organisers want you to. So whereas ReVolt has you battling beneath the legs of a dinosaur fossil on the polished floors of a science museum, Stunt GP will always have you contained on a proper, asphalt or wooden track. That's not to say the tracks aren't awesome though - the twists and turns, climbs, drops and loops are a marvel to behold in Stunt GP - especially as the camera has a habit of pulling back and letting you view your aerial adventures in all their splendour. Indeed, as the name of the game suggests, Stunt GP actively encourages the player to engage in any number of ridiculous and spectacular stunts, as well as trying to win the race they may also be taking part in. Your reward for pulling off these flips and somersaults are points which can then be spent on extra parts for your vehicle - lighter chassis, better engines and battery packs, more grippy tyres etc.


Unlike ReVolt, Stunt GP is rooted firmly in pseudo reality, so there are no weapon pickups as such, but conversely you need to keep an eye on your battery or fuel level. To it's detriment, Stunt GP doesn't have a track editor - something you would think ideal in a game of this ilk, but what it does have is a stupendous championship mode which traverses all 30 circuits in the game and features all the tactics of battery charging and upgrading that you'd expect an F1 simulator to employ. Also, and similarly to ReVolt, Stunt GP has a corking soundtrack...so make sure you crank the volume up. Elsewhere, you'll find a four player split-screen mode, arcade and stunt modes to hold the attention. Stunt GP also looks absolutely fantastic - most of the courses are pretty compact so you can view the whole track in most cases: get to the zenith of a circuit and turn back on yourself and you can examine the whole thing laid out before you, with no fogging whatsoever. Sadly, the frame rate suffers in places but this is a small price to pay for such a glorious racing experience. AI is perfectly balanced and the vehicle handling is suitable considering these are meant to be miniature toys. All in all it is a superlative title. So the question remains:

The best RC racer on the Dreamcast is...

It's a tough choice, I wont deny. Toy Racer can't really compete with the big boys so let's discount that one straight away; the main event is between ReVolt and Stunt GP. Both games offer excellent visuals, cracking music and their own individual style of racing. ReVolt is more about the weaponry, while Stunt GP is more about racing skill. They both have their individual merits - ReVolt has a full track editor and a more varied array of environments, whereas Stunt GP offers vehicle upgrades aplenty and a great variety of play modes. But ultimately, like the Highlander, there can be only one.

The best RC racer on the Dreamcast is...

ReVolt

It's the full package - loads of tracks, loads of cars, great music and ultimately it is a lot of fun to play. Stunt GP is also a worthy title, but in this competition it finishes as runner up.
Get some ReVolt it in your Dreamcast, you will not be disappoint!

The Land Before DLC: Toy Commander

Toy Commander is one of the Dreamcast's best games in my opinion. Not only is it an original take on the traditional 3D shooter in that you fly toy aircraft and drive ground units around a fully realised 3D house (toys which are actually being played with by a kid - the titular Toy Commander), but it really is an enjoyable experience. Missions are well balanced and varied in design, and on top of all that it has a great sense of humour. Oh, and it looks bloody fantastic even by today's standards. Yes, No Cliche really did pull a rabbit out of the hat when they put Toy Commander out as a launch title. It looked like something that was truly next-gen and played a mean game as well. Sadly, Toy Commander never recieved a true sequel and it remains a game that was born and died on the Dreamcast; the semi-sequel Toy Racer was little more than a mini game and was only playable online anyway, so those of us who either couldn't afford the dial-up tariff or simply weren't allowed to hog the only phone line in the house to play online games (like me!) missed out on the full experience.