This is a surprisingly competent racing game with a great sense of speed. Arguably too great, as the level design leads to a lot of blind corners and surprise jumps, especially in later courses. The core gameplay loop is engaging, and the controls are just tight enough that you still feel in control, which is important with how frantic some of the courses can get. That said, this game has its difficulty tuned for children, and you can tell. I beat this as a child, and as an adult I got first place on every level in about four hours of gameplay. Once you realize that parts only wear out when you stress them, you can employ a slow-and-steady tactic to massively outpace every AI racer. Adjusting the winnings using the arrow keys also helps, as the default payouts are pretty bad but the "skilled" payouts rocket you up in terms of performance. Also, a controller helps massively. I set up my Dualshock 4 with this and suddenly had no problems with Abyss, my absolute least favourite stage in the game. Didn't even need the Slide key. I played this a lot as a child, and have fond memories of it. Coming back to it now, I was surprised to see that it still holds up. The graphics don't look as good on a full-HD LCD as they did with that slight fuzz of a 15-inch CRT, and the in-game voices are a lot more grating than I remember. This new version, which seems to be a pretty hefty porting job, still has some issues. Nothing affecting the gameplay, though, it's mostly aesthetics. The fog and the skybox seem to fight for precedence on some levels and the music and engine souds cut out randomly. That said, it's a lot better than it was on my old Voodoo2 machine, where every transparent texture was rendered with a green background (which was then inverted because of the weird colour mapping that card had). I distinctly remember seeing my friend playing this on the N64 and marvelling at the purple energy beam, since it was yellow with a nontransparent blue background on my PC.
