All Star Racing

Imagine it's the year Gran Turismo 3 is released and you want a racing game, but you don't have a Playstation 2 yet. You buy All Star Racing for your trusty 'old' PSOne. What a letdown that would be... It sounds promising, 4 racing classes with different cars on different circuits.

The first thing to notice is that the four racing types are like four different games within the game. Each have their own menu, that all look a bit different, weird... Then you see that there is only a single race option, so a bit limited. Within these single races you get the option of three non-licensed cars (but clearly inspired by real-life cars) and three different tracks. These tracks aren't interchangeable between the four classes, so there are twelve tracks, but you can't race all cars on these twelve.

All right so it's a limited game, that's ok it isn't a big studio game like Gran Turismo. As long as the racing is good there is enough fun to be had. Well... to bad it doesn't succeed on that part as well. The cars are very difficult to control, the opponents don't drive realistic at all (and the difficulty is either very easy or almost impossible), and both the handling and hit detection feels weird. Also the game looks bad for a last era PSOne game and the sounds are simple at best.

So luckily I wasn't someone who bought All Star Racing at that time.