Publisher: Activision, www.activision.com
Ages: seven and up
Parental Advisory: Reckless driving
Can a game that lets you design futuristic cars and race them go wrong? Activision's Supercar Street Challenge offers this promising premise, but turns out to be a rather conventional arcade race game that showcases exotic cars.
Supercar offers a compelling collection of virtual vehicles that include the Pontiac Concept GTO, Saleen S7, Rinspeed E-Go Rocket, Bertone Pickster, Lotus Concept Vehicle M220, Callaway C12, Vision CTEK K/2, Fioravanti F100, and Pagani Zonda C12-S. The game also offers a good variety of tracks to race on that are set in London, Los Angeles, Monaco, Munich, and more-seven in all.
Supercar claims that you can customize your own supercar, but only lets you alter pre-designed segments of a car (front-end, rear-end, etc). Here you "morph" car parts by adjusting numbers until you like what you see. In the end, you're simply changing a car's color, adding wings, and altering its contours to your liking. The design tools are all about aesthetics with no means to alter a car's performance, other than distributing points between a car's speed, braking, handling, and acceleration. Many arcade race games that let you do this.
As an arcade race game, Supercar delivers a decent drive. The game looks great and gives you good control over your vehicle at simulated high speeds. But based on the text on the box, I was expecting a simulation that would pour on the physics, much as Disney Interactive's Ultimate Ride, a roller coaster designer and simulator, does. In Supercar, the vehicles and graphics look great, and the racing itself can be exhilarating, but there's little realism.
In the end, Supercar Street Challenge is a disappointment to those who want to experiment with design tools and refine their cars. But if you're not expecting this, you'll find that the title serves an adequate arcade race.
