Feel free to skip this post as this turned out to be quite rambly for a game that nobody plays.
(but hey, it does feel nice to be the first person to add a game to HLTB!)
I was looking through my old collection of game DVDs. I grew up in 2000s Ukraine, where piracy was pretty much the standard way of getting games. Advanced users knew how to use the internet, but me and my parents - we went to shady markets which would sell *gasp* bootleg game disks. (You could also buy licensed copies in supermarkets, but those were expensive - and if your kid asks for a video game, why would you buy the expensive version?)
Anyway, long story short, it turned out that the vast majority of my childhood game collection is just pirated games. Oh well.
I did some digging around and it turned out that, out of my dozens of DVDs (some of which feature "100 games in one"...), I only positively identified *4 games whose physical copies I own legally.*
Those games are:
Juiced - highly underrated racing game btw
Notice a pattern here... All of them are obscure racing games. I played the first three of them but I barely even touched the karting game. I decided to put an end to this today.
Michael Schumacher, the famous F1 pilot, famously started his career in kart racing. Someone made a game about this. It would have been funny if this was a silly arcade game in the style of Super Mario Kart, but no, karting is serious business here. Somebody made a game with the scope of a kart racer, but they didn't bother to make it fun, so they were trying to sell it as a "simulation" game.
/Look at this generic early-2000s goodness/
No.
Well, the soundtrack is surprisingly pretty good, and the game is quite challenging. There are no powerups and no upgrades, so the only way to get better at this game is to learn the tracks and learn to drive. No wonder I never completed this as a kid... The AI is quite fast, but is also really dumb - it will bump you and spin you out if you get in their way. You can only win by driving perfectly. Literally all the controls that you have to your disposal are arrow keys - accelerate, brake, turn. So the game is challenging but extremely repetitive. *4/10*
This game uses typical disk check DRM. I don't even try to get this type of stuff running under Linux. Wine doesn't play nicely with DRM, and even "no-CD cracks" are very hit-or-miss with this kind of stuff. I just played it on Windows.
