First off, big thanks to my YouTube homie truthfulpietro for showing me this travesty. You are truely the S&M master of gaming! Also, HUGE thanks to theJuice for the manual, cover, and disc scans!
Despite having some honor of being the ninth published game for the original PlayStation, Cosmic Race is known even more for being just about the worst racing game ever made, and rightfully so. It’s ugly (even by first gen standards), it’s clunky, and completely back-asswards; especially once you get acquainted with the controls, which must have been designed by a dyslexic paraplegic. Yeah, it’s insanely bad, but it’s intriguing at the same time considering the history behind it. Is it as bad as say, a game like Big Rigs?
It’s hard to talk about a game that most of the internet refers to as the “worst racing game ever” without comparing it to Big Rigs. In Big Rigs, there was no battle. There was no contest. There was nothing that in your way. There was no point! Cosmic Race does have a battle raging in it: a battle against the environment. I’m not saying that makes it the better game by any means. It’s an exhaustively convoluted, frustrating, and mentally draining experience. Is it the worst racing game ever? I’m on the fence. They’re both just horrible, horrible racing games. But each has its own brand of insanity going for it – I guess it’s whatever kind of S&M you’re into. Not that there’s anything close to a sexual experience here, hell, it’s the farthest from! But you didn’t need me to tell you that.
The history behind Cosmic Race can almost be more interesting than the game itself. Released in January 1995, it was the first and last game by a company called Neorex. Let’s step into the time machine and go back to back to 1996. A magazine called Game Players was coming to a close under its current name and format before becoming Ultra Game Players, a N64 publication. As a final hurrah, they reviewed Cosmic Race. Why was this important? Because every game they had reviewed from that point was rated from a perfect ten to Cosmic Race. The game replaced the zero which is, from what I hear, an actual number or so experts say. Even worse, the reviewer noted that the game used example assets from the PlayStation development kit. Deliciously ghetto fabulous.
Perhaps the first warning of what you are getting into isn’t the game itself but the manual that comes with it – namely the artwork submitted on behalf of the most gifted students Mrs. Yoshida’s 5th grade art class had to offer. I wonder if Neorex was actually that small of a company to hire such a shitty artist, or maybe they were in such a crunch in the three weeks they had to design this game that they only took the first draft concept drawings and called it a take…all Ed Wood style. Considering my skewed American view of life, I’d say all of Japan knew how to draw complex mechanical anime death machines, which leads me to believe that some anthropomorphic rabbit borg…thing would be cake.
Jesus crimeny, this far in and we haven’t gotten to the game yet. So here’s the deal. The menus are horrible. You’re forced to press start to choose everything, as X and O are of no use to you. Starting the main Cosmic Race mode, you’re prompted to enter your name where you can FINALLY press X to enter letters. The only catch is that you can’t press X or O on the END button, even though it’s part of the keyboard. You’ve got to press start for that. The same idea goes for just about every menu in the game, especially after each race. If you lose, and trust me you sure as hell will, you have to press start to retry the race or X to quit. On the other hand, when you finally win a race, pressing start will retry the race for you while pressing X lets you move on. I can’t tell you how many times this fucked me up. I’d be stupid not to mention that while you can save your progress after each race, you need to load a saved replay and watch the entire god forsaken thing before you can continue where you left off. There’s supposed to be a line between stupidity and outright insanity…but I’m having a hard time figuring this one out.
After solving the “Enter your name” puzzle, you get to choose a character. You can choose between five characters, surprisingly, each one has their strengths and weaknesses. Unsurprisingly, the same lame artwork is here in all of its digital glory. None of the characters are interesting, hell, one third of them look like they came from a furry convention. You’ve got the half man, half rabbit Cyan Square whose tagline seems to be “fire”. I don’t know why that is, but it’s plastered all over his wrist guards and on one side of his vehicle (or VED as the game calls it). In a humorous testament to cutting corners, the other side of his VED reads “ERIF”…nice going there. Rounding out the cast, Kenjyuro T drives a mech, plushie mascot Leo Clis Paldo drives what looks like a Corvette sans wheels, Easha Krueq looks like that one annoying chick that fucks up every anime movie, and who will ever forget about Barba Kue after seeing him. Dumpy jungle boy Barba Kue is the only character that didn’t get his name from a random word/letter generator. He also drives what looks like VW van that was made by the Gilligan’s Island castaways and adorned with pineapple wings. His blank, wall-eyed stare hints at retardation and his hunched posture results in some sort of pity sympathy that makes him the coolest of the bunch by default.
For a game that calls itself Cosmic Race, three of the four levels you race through seem pretty down to earth, literally. I don’t care how many games you’ve played or how long you’ve gamed in your life, you’re guara-damn-teed to make the same mistake I, and the dozens of people who have played this game have made. You’ll start a race, press what you think is the “go” button, and promptly fall through the track to the ground. Unless you are fluent in Japanese, you’ll spend another thirty minutes trying to fiddle with the controls to see what works while trying to adjust to the migraine—inducing colors and insanely close draw distance the game throws at you.
Here’s how the madness plays out: you press R1 to accelerate and L1 to brake. The Square and circle buttons let you slightly turn corners while the left and right on the d-pad help to strafe your vehicle left and right. You can’t really get away with depending on the square and circle buttons to turn corners, however, since you’ll almost always fly off of the track, which is a burden on itself; more on that in a second. What you’re forced to do, especially in the later levels, is press the square and circle buttons to turn in conjunction with the d-pad buttons to “lean” into corners. Are you confused yet?
Now that we’ve battled with the controls and seemingly won, it’s time to get our race on…our COSMIC race that is! Well, maybe not. You see, the tracks are designed to appease the wonky mechanics you need to master in order to win. The track itself is a transparent floor that you can pass through with ease. Most of the time track decides to meander off and disappear into the scenery; leaving you to depend on the red and white side barriers to guide you along. Leaving the track will start counting down the timer at the top of the screen. When the timer reaches zero, it’s game over. In order to get your “VED” up to speed, you have to stay close to the track, or in most cases, the ground – leaving you in a great position to crash into whatever decides to pop up five feet in front of you. The closer you are to the track, the faster you go. Your opponent will keep a steady speed and can easily be beaten when you aren’t crashing into the scenery or losing the race due to the counter timing out or your life bar reaches zero from crashing into scenery or the sporadic pedestrian traffic that inexplicably pollutes the race track. Have the Cosmic Race sponsors no safety precautions?
You’ll race…err try to survive four stages, each consisting of three races on your transparent, floating road to victory. You can play any one of them from the get-go and you get a preview of each track courtesy of a 30x30 block that looks more like a sprinkled Wal-Mart birthday cake than any kind of useful map. Stage one has you racing across a huge green field littered with tree arches and random hills and mountains. Stage two flips the script and pits you against a rival underwater as you try your best to avoid numerous pink bug-eyed fish and clumps of rock-solid seaweed that just happens to grow in the middle of the track – leaving you no choice but to jump out of bounds just to avoid the damn things. Stage three is the obligatory lava level where you’ll get psyched out by mountains of lava that disappear just as you’re about to hit them and the constant hairpin turns into giant pyramids the level has to offer. The final stage actually lives up to the game’s namesake and reputation. You’re plopped into the middle of space, which I can only assume is the landfill of space considering the insane amount of crap flying around everywhere. The mechanics of the previous levels are thrown out of the window, leaving you to go as fast as you’d like. Your only task is to stay inside of a square tunnel that only draws out about six feet in front of you. The only catch is if you end up flying out of the tunnel and even slightly lose sight of it, you’re doomed to float in space for an eternity….or at least until the twenty seconds of timer the game gives you runs out. The tunnels will use every trick in the book to make you float out of them too. They’ll twist, they’ll turn, they’ll go straight up. There’s no reasoning with it, the only way to win is to endure the punishment and try not to suck as much as the computer opponent.
Adding to the insanity of Cosmic Race is the fact that you seem to be rewarded for underhanded tactics like cutting corners. In fact, it seems to be encouraged at certain points. Sure, you have the timer to worry about, but if you get to know a course well enough and know where a couple of turns intersect a straight line, you’ll always fucking win. That’s not to say that Cosmic Race is a breeze either. It’s just about the most frustrating game in existence, almost as if the designers exploited tracks to take advantage of the countless bugs that plague the game. Just about every level has multiple sections where the track will deviate from the ground and float over some huge canyon. Passing over these huge gaps results in some sort of super vacuum that starts sucking your vehicle off of the track. Being out of bounds, nowhere near the ground, and watching the timer tick away, you’re essentially stalled. What you end up having to do is frantically crash to the ground below to gain any kind of speed before attempting to make your way back to the track only to fight the unseen force that tries to push you back out again.
The rest of the time, you’ll frantically try to trade off taking damage or taking time off of the ever-watchful timer at the top of the screen as you try to make your way to the goal. If you are fortunate enough reach the finish line, you risk the chance of flying past the giant fucking goal balloon and crashing into a mountain behind it only to struggle with the god damned controls to turn yourself around, not to mention the fact that the goal might not even appear thanks to the draw (lack of) distance – even though the damn thing might be less than ten feet away from you. In the meantime, your opponent will steadily make his way to the finish line. It all depends on how much of a lead you have.
Aside from the single-player Cosmic Race mode, you’ll have the option to choose a story mode which lives up to its name – you only get a bunch of text that tries to explain why all of this craziness is going on. Seeing that it’s in Japanese and I can’t make heads or tails of it, I’d only assume it’s a sort of Mystery Science Theater style of punishment where you have to race through the worst tracks known to man in order to appease some sadistic scientist.
There are also two multiplayer modes tacked on in some vain attempt to give the game more depth. Chase mode plays out like a ghetto game of tag where player two tries to collide into player one. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? Scramble puts two players into a barren world loosely based on the single player stages where both attempt to collect gargantuan point balloons. If you thought the draw distance was bad when the game was running full screen, just wait until you have that bastard pulling double duty with two screens! The radar that points out where the points are located is useless thanks to the even shittier draw distance in multiplayer resulting in your vehicle being literally on top of the points on the radar, but the balloon being nowhere to be seen. The end result is two players mindlessly flying around, frantically trying to get to just the right spot where the points will actually appear. There was even one point where we both were looking at each other wondering where the damn point balloon was, and it wasn’t until we accelerated at each other in a game of chicken that the balloon in between us appeared out of nowhere. Ugh.
Perhaps the reason this review is over two thousand words is so I can attempt to convey to you, the reader and fellow gamer, the cornucopia of issues and frustration this game brings. There’s no mystery why Neorex has become a footnote of gaming history, only to be trampled by the rush of actual good games that came out for the PlayStation once it came of age. Comparing this to other abysmal games like Big Rigs is almost like comparing two different types of poison: they both taste like shit and will kill you in the end, the question is really which one works fastest in the task of killing yourself or others. For a game like this to be licensed and released in the shape it was released in is only something no Action 52, Bible Games, or Sunday Funday could even dream to achieve. I only hope it’s seen as a lesson.
Since 2007, Gamescrap has brought you the the worst video games, game commercials, game merchandise, and gaming moments ever to grace the industry. No matter if it's a beloved classic or the next hot thing, no bad game is safe from the horrors of the Gamescrap heap.
Since 2007, Gamescrap has brought you the the worst video games, game commercials, game merchandise, and gaming moments ever to grace the industry. No matter if it's a beloved classic or the next hot thing, no bad game is safe from the horrors of the Gamescrap heap.