Firebugs (Playstation)

 I'm sure a lot of you reading will remember Rollcage, the Playstation racing game featuring cars that were very obviously inspired by the radio control car Ricochet, released by Tonka a few years earlier. For some reason, it's a game I very heavily associate with magazine demo discs, even though I've long since played the full game, for a lot more time than I ever played the demo. Anyway, it had a sequel not long after release, called Rollcage Stage II (or apparently, Death Track Racing for its PC release in the US). Then, a few years later, Firebugs came out.

 

Mechanically, it's a sequel to the Rollcage games, though thematically, it's had some changes. The original games were similar in theme and setting to the Wipeout games, being set in a stylised luxury future with entire cities seemingly designed around the idea of having racetracks built in them. Firebugs, being a PAL exclusive released in 2002, seems to be following an idea I've seen in some late release Japanese exclusive Playstation games: the only people still buying games for the older console are probably kids. So there's a bunch of cartoony characters, and the world itself is a lot more brightly coloured, too (though the music is still the same kind of awful garbage that seemingly every European-developed Playstation game had to have since the console's beginning).

 

It really does look great, too. The stages are stylistically rendered, with the textures all bearing very bright and bold colours, along with thick, stark black outlines. It's a clever way of getting some cartoony graphics out of the aging hardware that manage to avoid the game looking like a consolation prize for the kids who just got their older sibling's console as a hand-me-down. There's been some minor changes to how the game plays, too. No big changes to the concept or anything: you can still drive upside-down and on the walls and ceilings, but the handling is generally a bit less chaotic and frenzied, and while suddenly spinning around in the air and landing faced the wrong way was a near-constant problem in the Rollcage games before you got the hang of things, it's a lot rarer here.

 

Something I'd like to highlight is the power-up system. You have two power-up slots, which I'll refer to as left and right. The first time you get a power-up, it'll fill your left slot, which is a power that's unique to the character you're playing. Then, if you pick up another before using your left power up, it'll fill your right slot, with a randomly selected power-up from the game's standard pool. Most of the power-ups are standard stuff like missiles, shields, and speed boosts, but I do also like the one that slowly opens a portal in front of your vehicle, which then instantly sends you slightly further ahead on the track. In Firebugs, the portal is just a glowing white ring, but I wonder if this game had gotten a sequel on more powerful hardware, if you'd be able to see your destination through the portal in real time?

 

There's another weird quirk in the way that the single player mode is structured. There are five planets, and each planet has two main races, the first with three laps, and the final with five. If you come first in the first race, you get thirty points and go straight to the final. If you don't, you get significantly fewer points (second place only gets you ten!), and have to race in two very short one-on-one races before going to the final. You'll get some extra points for winning these races, but they really feel like a punishment, since they're so short that they're barely longer than the loading screens that precede them!

 

Firebugs is a decent enough game, but there's just something lacking in it that I can't quite pin down. It's obviously a fast, exciting racing game, but it never really feels like it is. It doesn't really make sense, but against all logic, while playing the game, I quickly felt like I was just tediously going through the motions, waiting for the races to be over, rather than feeling like an engaged, active participant. I guess the best I can do is recommend that you give it a try yourself? It's clearly a competent game, but it just didn't click with me like I feel like it should have.