LogFAQs > #951240018

34. Biker Mice From Mars (SNES, 1994)


Biker Mice From Mars in general is so ridiculous. I mean, anthropomorphic rodents with feelers on their heads coming from Mars to Earth and quickly adapting to motocycles and getting into the biker gang culture is just so damn dumb and silly. I admit that I didn't watch the show until last year when I watched a single episode and was content with stopping there. My introduction to the franchise was with this game when I played it over at one of my mom's clients' houses (she is a home-based speech/language pathologist) before I started kindergarten. I loved it so much that when I found a used copy at some local video game store a few years later, I didn't even look at the price tag and just bought it (I want to say it was between $10-15).

This isometric racer is rad as hell. You can choose one of six characters (heroes Throttle, Modo, and Vinnie or villains Karbunkle, Grease Pit, or Limburger). While the heroes have similar vehicles, the villains have some pretty cool vehicle designs with Karbunkle riding a mechanical spider and Limburger has a hovercraft. Each course is your standard three-lap race, but combat plays a heavy role. Each character has their own weapon that can be used a finite amount of times in a lap, and it gets recharged once you start a new lap. Wrestling with racing and combat is quite the fascinating risk/reward. Do you potentially cost yourself seconds by lining yourself up with opponents to shoot a projectile in front or drop something behind or do you go straight for the fastest lap and make yourself vulnerable to enemy attacks? I liked this system a lot because I never stuck to any single idealogy. Context dictated what I would do, and that makes things more fun and interesting to me.

Further enhancing the racing/combat combo was its battle mode. It has a main mode and a battle mode (as well as time trials), and they are both set up the same. The difficulty setting not only affects the AI but also the courses that you play. If you wish to play all the courses, you need to play on the highest difficulty. While there are only a few themes for courses (city, sewer, coastal, etc...), the lack of theme variety belies the great course design that helps each of them feel unique while also doing a great job at getting the player aclimated with its many twists and turns.

In main mode, if you lose all of your health (you can normally take three hits), you get back up again, but in battle mode, the star of the game, if you lose all of your health, you aren't getting back in the race, and that applies to all racers. Given the general aggressiveness of the AI, it isn't uncommon for a race to end before someone crosses the finish line. Depending on where you finish, you earn money in both modes that can be used to upgrade your ride. It's pretty basic but something that rarely existed back then and adds yet another wrinkle to the racing/combat dynamic.

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KCF can't actually be a real person but he is - greengravy
If you smell what the rock is cooking he's cooking crap - ertyu