Review by: a, Dimension S reader

I got Revolt and Toy Commander and two extra controllers (Total of 4) on Saturday. We started out playing Toy Commander for a bit, I earned a few rooms and that was fun. We did some multiplayer which is nice, cat an mouse is totally fun.

Then we started playing Revolt. We start out with Toys in the Hood and just can't stop playing. I think we played that level more than any other... Saturday night, my roomate stayed up until 2 am trying to earn more tracks in Championship mode.

For those of you who haven't played this game, it is awesome. There are several cars to choose from when you start the game out, and some cars suck on some tracks, so you kinda have to think about what track you are about to play on. Case in point: in the botanical garden, using the Sprintster XL (I think) you will get whomped. The car only has front wheel drive and bad traction, so cars like BigVolt (BigFoot? Copyright infringement?) and any other car with good shocks/traction will kick you butt. There is alot to this game that we have yet to see, and we are still unlocking tracks and cars. It looks like there are over 40 cars, and we have seen 10 or 11 tracks so far. Also you have reverse tracks too. Races are hectic and fast! Cars are beautiful and detailed. Levels are built with high resolution textures and are varied and fun. You can play aggressively and cut alot of corners, but if you aren't careful you will wipe out. Or you can play safely and take the safest routes but lose a few precious milliseconds.

Control is excellent with the Dreamcast controller. L and R are brake and accelerate, respectively. The analog will steer, of course. X is an instant rear view look. I haven't found this terribly useful. Y is a 'Put you back upright on the road' button. When I wipe out, I typically hit this before I even skid to a stop. Some weopons will null this out for a moment, so you have to wait until the attack is over before you can right yourself. Hugely useful button. A is your attack button. Launches whatever weopon you have handy. B is camera change. Four angles which I will call Up, Near, Cockpit and Movie. Movie seems useless. It is annoying to even have because when you switch angles (Up and Near are the two I use) you can get screwed up. Cockpit is insanely fast but illogical in any case, since this IS an RC car.

Weapons are inventive and cool...There are missles which have limited homing and make nice explosions...Don't fire at an enemy too close to you as you will probably give him a boost and blow yourself onto your top. There are fake item bombs to blow up your greedy opponents, Oil slicks (be careful, if you only slick one side of tires or the other, you are far more likely to wipe out than if you slick both, mainly because of differences in resistance,) A shockwave weopon that will warp everything it passes, flipping most cars over that are too close to it. That is awesome to fire into a large group of cars (the Museum is a great level for this weopon!) There is also a Bomb that turns your car antenna into a fuse and you will blow up when the fuse goes out. If you touch another car before the fuse goes, then TAG! they get the bomb and you are off scott free! You also can get Water Balloons, and a electric charge that will drain batteries of other cars that get close to you. (I stole this one from my friend Palpatine!)

A track editor is included in the game! Way cool. Each track seems to take up 7 blocks. If you ever built tracks with Excitebike, this kicks ass on it. You have several different pieces and surfaces to use, and each piece has several variants and can be raised/lowered and some can be tilted. Multiple paths are not built in (though my roomates and I are going to try to hack the VMU save file.) but if you are inventive, shortcuts are possible to build in. We discovered some neat tricks using the 'Pipe' piece that the original programmers probably wouldn't approve of. When you make a level, there are two copies: The editable one and the 'exported' one. Both take up 7 blocks.

I only have a few small problems with the game:

Battle tag seemed stupid and pointless at first. Later we discovered it is pretty cool, so long as you don't play the stupid Museum track... Oh well. I didn't buy this game for anything but racing RC cars anyhow. Ghost Town 1 doesn't define your track very well. There is a part where you have to go down a dead end street and when you get to the end, you MUST go right and do a U turn around a few poles and a barrel. You must go around ALL of them. If you slip between the barrel and the pole (which can happen accidentally), you will get a red X on your screen telling you you are going the wrong direction. Also, using the Y button to put you back on track sometimes doesn't work. There is one area where there are a few dead ends off to the side from the main track. If you are stuck in one of them and press Y, it directs you to where you can get back on the road. If you happen to be stuck behind something, it makes you even more stuck. True, if you had been careful, you wouldn't be stuck, but it IS annoying. The other tracks don't seem to have this problem though, and after maybe 10 runs, this track shouldn't pose a problem for you either.

Wierd glitch in Rooftops: When jumping over skylights, if you wipe out before the 3rd jump or otherwise hit the Y button, it will jump you AHEAD to the top of a ramp, but you will have passed an invisible 'checkpoint' so it will tell you that you are going the wrong way and your lap will not count unless you go back and pass that invisible 'checkpoint'.

The menu interface is missing a few options. If you are playing a multiplayer race, when it is over, there is no option for 'change level'. You have to back out to the Start screen and re-select your care and everything. In a way, this makes sense, as you don't want to use the same car on every level, but some times you just don't want to have to change the settings for four people. Luckily, if everyone just jams on A until the level select window pops up, it goes fairly quick. Also, there is a 'Replay Track' option when you finish a race too. Load times are fairly quick (2 to 4 seconds. Longer on the custom built tracks though)

In Championship mode (A cup where you have to place at least 3rd on each track to continue across 4 different tracks) they don't let you switch cars between tracks. This makes the more extreme cars unsuitable for this mode. Cars like BigVolt and BossVolt and Sprintster will get destroyed by more middle of the line cars.

All in all, this game is awesome enough to overlook these MINOR problems though. My friend said she is going to buy a Dreamcast just so she can get this game, and she isn't even a big fan of video games... =) It is just that cool.