Carmageddon 2: Carpocalypse Now

This is the embodiment of 90s blood and violence extravaganza. Running over pedestrians, destroying public property, breaking into other peoples' homes and smashing against opponents' cars is all fun and strangely satisfying. The game is divided into groups of 3 regular levels and one mission level. To unlock the next group, you need to beat the current group's mission level and, to unlock the curent mission level, you need to beat the 3 regular levels first. This makes the gameplay sequential for the most part although you can revisit already completed levels from the past in any order you want after you unlocked them. In regular levels you can either race against your opponents through a bunch of checkpoints on the map in a circuit a predefined number of laps, kill every single pedestrian on the map (this is very difficult) or, the most fun way, massacring and blowing up all your opponents until you're the only one left standing in the whole level. Achieve any of these goals and you win the level so that you can move onto the next one. But there's always a timer that you have to be wary of, the total time depending on the difficulty you started the campaign with. In the regular levels you can add to the time you have left by killing pedestriants or attacking and damaging opponents, which just continues to incentivize violence. You almost never start out with enough time to just purely race across the checkpoints so, one way or another, you will have to start causing mayhem, either to your opponents or to the people around you, even if you want to play the peaceful way. Some mayhem will always be in order. Aiding in your destruction are power-ups scattered systematically across the maps that only add to the fun like giving you a giant metal spring ability with which to launch opponent cars flying into the air, wrecking them. Or Mine farts out of your car's backside. Yes, really. Or automatic pedestrian zapping passives. This game is just complete bloody bliss.

Something I just couldn't keep away from. My physical copy of the game is so worn out it'll probably turn into dust if I try to install it once more. DRM of the good old days, install until it breaks. Not sure if it's the soundtrack, extreme physics with over the top stunts or just the total carnage we all love, that gets me back into this game year after year. It's in the same league with Deus Ex and Heroes of Might & Magic 3, where you just have to play it again, every time someone mentions the name.

Run over pedestrians, drive like a bastard against other vicious opponents, still-great-for-the-time crash physics: the core of the awesome Carma gameplay remains. What is unwelcome are these ridiculous missions between free races, and the introduction of stick figure polygon pedestrians. Carma 1 was pure delightful anarchy and chaos, Carma 2 is slightly better tech and slightly worse gameplay.

The second game in the Carmageddon is nice enough; some things have been improved, but it is not nearly as good as the original. First of all, the gameplay has been seen before; you can drive recklessly through the city, running over pedestrians and being a complete psychopath, but the shock value is not there anymore, if you've tried the original. Second, the graphics are too sleek, too nice, where the first game had a wonderful, writty and grotesque. While C2's graphics are better on a technical level, it is not better on a aestetic level. Third, and worst, is the handling and gravity with the car. This game feels more like driving on rail, while the first game had a very realistic approach to driving (and crashing) that were way ahead of its time. In short, don't play this game unless you really have to: You've played the original Carmageddon back and forth several times.

I can still remember the first time I played this on an old Pentium computer with a Voodoo2 GFX Card. Singing along with Iron Maiden as I slaughtered thousands of pedestrians while trying to survive the constant onslaught of my fellow psychopathic drivers. It was as gloriously over the top as it is now. Proof positive that games do not have to have super-flashy graphics to be magnificent.