Carmageddon (1997)
Genres:Sport, Arcade
Themes:Action
Game modes:Single player, Multiplayer
Story:Take the wheel as Max Damage as you plow scores of vehicles unlucky enough to be in your way in Carmageddon, an action racing game. Your soundtrack will be the sound of crunching metal, the splatter of motor oil on the windshield, and the screams of skidding tires. With a white-knuckled grip on the wheel, you'll have the choice of 23 crash mobiles (from a terrifying monster truck to a high octane Dragster) and 30+ levels of hellish fury and motorized terror.Show more
This is already on GoG, the Carmageddon Max Pack is the base game bundled with the expansion. Not sure why this is still being listed as part of the Dream List.
Stress relief from my day job, driving taxi.
Picking up, I mean off, people on the street in a safe and effective way. Getting them to a destination, usually not of their choice. The OTT modifiers, the completely unnecessary 'race'. Destroying your competition. Just doing what would be completely illegal things in a safe and satisfying way.
The hardware reqs BITD weren't all that high so I could run this. The pixelly graphics were a feature not a bug. The powers that be were not happy about what was depicted, even in such an obviously unreal way. Cartoonish comes to mind, even if they weren't even that good.
Hours spent in happy decompression on this Good Old Game.
My Carmageddon Obsession - A Love Letter to 1997's Most Controversial Racer
I must've been 12 when I first booted up Carmageddon on our family PC. That intro with Iron Maiden's "The Trooper" MIDI version blasting through our tinny speakers - man, I knew I was in for something special. This wasn't your dad's racing game.
1997 was a different time. While everyone else was playing sanitized racers with invisible walls and time penalties, Carmageddon let you do EVERYTHING wrong. Forget the checkpoints - I'd spend hours just exploring the massive open maps, launching my car off ramps, and yes, mowing down those hilariously pixelated pedestrians that exploded into red polygons. The way they'd dive out of the way screaming "I was in the war!" in that ridiculous voice - it was so over-the-top cartoonish that even my parents couldn't help but laugh.
The freedom was intoxicating. No game had given us this kind of sandbox destruction before GTA even existed. remember how we all tried to go backward to track crashing into oncoming cars in every other racing games ? !
Want to ignore the race and hunt down opponents? Go for it. Feel like climbing that seemingly impossible cliff face? The physics engine would let you try. Every session turned into its own emergent story.
Then 2016 rolled around with Max Damage, and... oof. What a gut punch. They had all the ingredients - better graphics, modern physics, the original team - but somehow forgot what made Carmageddon special. The cars handled like wet bars of soap sliding on ice. Zero weight, zero impact, zero satisfaction. Every collision felt like bumping marshmallows together.
Where was the crunchy metal-on-metal impacts? The satisfying THUNK when you T-boned someone at 100mph? Instead we got floaty, weightless vehicles that seemed allergic to the ground. It felt like an early access game that never got finished - probably because it basically was.
The campaign mode of Carmageddon was a fun thing, though some of the challenges I still think were unfair. Where this game shone brightly though was the multiplayer. The chaos was incredible and so, sooo much fun. Destruction Derby brought destructive cars, but in Carmageddon you could annihilate them.
Best in the series of car destrucion games. Variety of cars that you can drive is amazing. Sound track is amazing, cars feel pretty good to drive and maps are different enough to keep you interested.
My brother had to disable the driver's voicelines after 9yo me kept repeating "sh**" when the character would say it after driving too fast. Although he found it hillarious.
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