Wacky Wheels

Posted by Davrinsky sky on 20 May, 2014 at 9:08PM

Tags: racing, race carts, animals, hedghogs, traps,

Wacky Wheels

Seeing the Mario cart posts recently made me want to share this. I think it's fair to say that this is the first cart racing game I have ever played. It's very similar to Mario cart for the SNES. looks similar in quality and game play for the most part. Whacky wheels is mostly the same setting as Mario cart, except all the characters you can play as are animals and the power ups or abilities you pick up are actually as you see them as you drive to pick them up. speaking of the abilities you pick up, there are normally hedgehogs hanging around doing random things that you can drive into to pick up. some of the random things these hedge hogs are doing involve chilling on the water, reading a news paper, sitting on the toilet. There is even one looking angry about to push down on a lever implying some kind of explosive.. once you pick up a hedge hog, you essentially just picked up ammo. You shoot these hedge hogs at the other racers to stall them for a moment so you can get ahead of them. the other abilities you can pick up can be oil to leave a mess behind, a bomb waiting forever for a collision, or these mad looking little border patrol things. they mostly have a pastern you can doge by easy luck to continue on the race course. 

This game was pretty fun, and was also pretty funny about how you can interact with the environment of the level you're in. if you collide head on to a pillar, your character will fly at the screen, the screen cracks and your little animal slides down and you re spawn near the collision. you could run into a stack of tires and one of the tires flies up and gets on your car. if you go into deep waters you basically turn into a little submarine eye piece peeking out. you travel really slow when that happens. Parts of the race tracks have a little F-Zero taste, where these a little boost and also jump borders to help you get ahead.

One thing that's difficult about this game is the drifting. this game is mostly hard because the maps that are supposed to be hard have very sharp turns. the bots basically just smoothly go through it like nothing. normally, you have to slow down or break to keep from running into deep water or mud. The shareware version lets you choose 4 out of 8 animals. all of them have the same ability. the shareware version also only lets you play the amateur class race.


well, there is more. there is a shoot out mode where you collect a bunch of hedge hogs and shoot a bunch of ducks that keep spawning. the goal is to get as many ducks as you can before the timer goes out. you can do this 2 player. I remember one keyboard and 2 players involved the numpad for the 2nd player controller. I didn't mention that this is a DOS game on the PC. you could also race 2 player. there is an option to do a local connection for multi play but I've never used it. This game is pretty fun overall with all the animal sounds in contrast to the Mario sounds when you pass by.