💾 Archived View for appl.garden › play › wacky-wheels.gmi captured on 2023-07-10 at 13:23:04. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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A Super Mario Kart clone released for MS-DOS by Apogee in 1994, was somewhat popular at the time. Another nostalgic game for me: one of my earliest memories is playing this on my dad's Windows 98 ThinkPad, despite the fact that both of those OSs and the game itself are older than me.
If I ignore nostalgia, then not really. The game has 3 tournaments, 2 speeds and 3 difficulty levels. I just did each tournament with higher-speed vehicles and increased the difficulty as I went. In practice the difficulty ranges from "super easy" to "the freakin' pelican will overtake you no matter what, so you just have to drive perfectly and then shoot at him at the last second, this is the only way to win". The physics are very basic and the drifting feels more like rapid rotation than actual sliding.
This shark and this raccoon are burned into my memory since the age of 4.
The one neat thing about this was experiencing that early 90s PC video game humor. This is not just Mario Kart, this is Mario Kart /but slightly edgier/: instead of driving karts, you are /escaping from the zoo on stolen lawnmowers/, and instead of powerups, you /pick up hedgehogs and violently throw them at your opponents/. As fun as that sounds, the game is just too basic by any modern standard. *4/10*, glad that this took only an hour to beat.
The game is now sold on GOG as a convenient package using DOSBox, with support for Linux, macOS and Windows. Though I did run into a bit of trouble with the Linux version since they forgot to include one required library which is not installed on modern Linux distros anymore. This seems to affect a bunch of other games, but at least there is an easy known fix for it.
Given that this blog is a tiny bit nerdy, maybe it would be more appropriate if I installed the latest version of DOSBox from official repos myself, and got the game running this way, instead of relying on GOG to package it for me. But honestly, I just wanted to experience a tiny bit of nostalgia, with a game that I suspected wouldn't be super-amazing, so I was a bit lazy about it.
Game finished 2023-06-01
gardenapple - 2023-06-29
