#grooverider

(1997) The Prototype Years - Higher Ground

In this series, I’m looking into weird and obscure games that I had on the PlayStation 2 because I think the console is a time capsule of the video games industry. A fossil.

Manual and Disc xerox courtesy of Passion for Games, GrooveRider: Slot Car Racing © System 3, 2003

I thought no better place to start than a game that I really did adore as a child that was called GrooveRider: Slot Car Racing (Slot Car Thunder in the US). A racing game with the cute premise of being toy cars on a Scalextrix track was printed on the fabled blue discs that are famous for making your console very, very loud.

The maps and tracks were admittedly low-poly and visually uninteresting living rooms and office spaces but I found that that was only fitting for what the game was offering. It didn’t go beyond what Mario Kart games of old had to offer in the sense that you raced in some cups and tournaments, played against your friends and did time trials. There were also power-ups because I assume that the designers of the game realized that there wasn’t many ways to get in front of your opponent. They were limited to your bog-standard speed-up, invincibility and lazer shots which worked like red shells in Mario Kart.

Screenshot courtesy of The Video Games Museum

The most satisfying part about the game was being neck-and-neck with an opponent and being able to successfully barge them off the track because i relish any opportunity in a game like this to be extremely annoying. I also enjoyed being able to nail an optimum speed for going around corners because, similarly to the Trials games, you could lose traction and come loose. If you went too fast, you would just come flying off the track.

I also enjoyed all the cutesy cars you could play as like the fake Lamborghinis and the fake Caterhams. All this made the premise a lot more interesting than it just being a racing game but on a toy track. It was admittedly a very safe formula to opt for tropes seen in kart games of the time. Nonetheless, it didn’t stop the outlets at the time from pouring scorn and venom on the product and I wasn’t aware of the negative reputation it got until I was very much older.

From whatever scraps of reviews and coverage that I can find online from major outlets, it was reviewed unfavourably by critics for lacking features and for the gameplay not being all that interesting which is probably true. If you played the great racing games of the time, GrooveRider would’ve definitely been an underwhelming experience. It’s just odd how harsh the scores were. The highest score that I found was from GameZone at 5.8/10 and I know scores don’t matter all that much really. I just can’t help but wonder what was expected of racing games at the time. It was definitely oversaturated with intellectual properties ending in “-Kart” and there wasn’t that much but I would’ve said a handful was more than enough.

But I don’t think GrooveRider falls into that category and I genuinely believe that it does have something new to bring to the table even though it is a little flaccid. It has been barely revisited since and the only games that I can think of that are similar are Penny Racers and, more recently, Table Top Racing.

I wouldn’t recommend going out and buying it because, like a lot of old PS2 games, you can’t. But everyone had that obscure driving game that they played when they were a kid and seemingly noone else did. This was mine.