Club Drive - Atari Jaguar

So after the awesome experience of getting my jaguar console, I decided to head back for more games, seeing as I'd probably never see new games on a shelf (or a bargain bin as these were) again, and from looking at the boxes one stood out in particular, club drive, an untextured 3D racer, heading through the streets of san francisco, This is gonna be like virtua racing, its gonna rock....so I head back and pay the full asking price (that's right £7.99) rather upset by the lack of bargain I head back to my office with it, where it will sit for some time before revealing its glory unto me...

Yup you read right, office...everybody has a job at some stage, I used to...I used to make video games for the GBA, anyway me and a couple of other guys were working on some title or other, and deadline was approaching, so for a little incentive we decided we wouldn't allow ourselves to play the jaguar till the game was done, in the last week we had a few 24 hour straight shifts, with 4-6 hours at home and then back for another 24, until it was done...eventually at 4 AM or so one morning we hand over the final master, so fuck me up, it's jaguar time....so you have to remember at this point we are delirious from lack of sleep, and I am slightly drunk because I said to my boss I'll work late as long as there's beer to be drunk...

so we open another beer and the beautiful sounds of the worst game music to ever be written piss in to our ears, "jesus the game must be so good that they didn't give a fuck about the music?", after frantically trying every one of the 600 buttons on the jaguar controller we find the one that starts the action, the action starts seemingly with no mode or game select screen, we later find out that we have inadvertently skipped it because the front end menu's of the game suck ass so much..

so I am in a car that looks like a squashed shoe box driving round in a boxy world, that seems to make fuck all sense, wait it's becoming clear, fuck we are in a fucking giant lounge, its like some fucked up micro machines with the suck turned way up high. so it's a racing game...OK where's the track? where the fuck are the other cars, and what's that spinning sparkly thing?? I'll drive in to it, FUCK ME, WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT...some body just put the shittest sound effect ever to be put on planet earth in to air around me - put it back, I will never be clean again.....whoever made this sound effect should have been killed at birth, or prior to birth...actually when the feast invent time machines, I am going to go back though time and wipe out their complete family line 1 by 1. yes so when you pick up the thing you hear this, that's right some cock-end saying "aaalllwite" I want to punch him, anyway so I drive on and realise that the handling of the car is absolute crap, oh and the environment looks appalling, like a city made of 4 lego bricks, this game is just fucking nonsense...

after searching the back of the box and the manual it all becomes clear, the year is 2098 (one year after wipeout) driving cars is illegal, unless you happen to get your hands on one of the specially developed "indestructible cars", it seems that club drive is some island resort where you get to go and see what its like to be a toy car in your neighbor's house, or drive round the old west in race...or drive in the skateboard park, for cars....yeah its all there shit and more shit, however for some reason I am having the time of my life playing this thing (and so is everyone around me)

eventually a phone rings and we have to get back to work fixing some bug in our pretty bad but not nearly bad enough game.

so today I got the game out again for the first time since that fateful night, I was a little worried that maybe lack of sleep had made me imagine it, and this game wasn't really the electronic equivalent of a bad trip, but there it was clear as day...I found the mode select, and played "collect" and picked up all the fuzzy things whilst trying not to tear my face off each time I heard "that" sound effect...I completed it first go and ranked top of the leader board (not a hard task)....then I found race mode.

in the race mode menu it displays another car as though you will be racing against someone, well you don't it's just you alone on one of the 4 tracks the game includes, so I race the stupid wild west track, its fucking mess of jagged polygons, but at least my mini car is full size again. I am racing down a real track, however just going over the divide from one poly to the next can cause my car to spin around uncontrollably and leave me facing in the wrong direction, kick ass.....anyway so the race mode is shit too, the whole game is the shittest game ever, ever, but it rules in it's own special way, you must deprive yourself of sleep, get blind drunk and play this game, then and only then will its true awesome crushing power be revealed unto you...

from inside the booklet (with no photoshop editing what so ever!!)

Yes the soundtrack, this is what hell sounds like (in the game the volume levels are so varied from one track to the next, it really makes you wonder if anyone played the game before they released it) I cant think of a worse videogame soundtrack, I wont be held responsible for any personal trauma suffered from downloading these files.

1 - menu, this one seems quite inoffensive, not good, and still bad, just not hateful....- 654K

2 - geromes pad, the tune form the giant house, its got that rollercoaster of love riff in it, my personal favorite on the badness front. - 1.5MB

3 - san francisco this is the audio equivalent of insanity, actually if you listened to this (or geromes pad) on repeat for 24 hours I think you would actually go insane, (maybe I'll try this theory out on a rat or something, although how do you tell a sane rat from an insane one? OK fuck that idea) - 1.87MB

4 - wild west, a hateful piece of evil, but not quite up to level of tracks 2 and 3... - 1.22MB

5 - velocity park, this one isn't so bad, its almost listenable. - 1.4MB

6 - high score entry, this is more of the first tracks rambling idiocy again... - 1.08MB

and of course the sound effects...

1 - awwwwwwwllwite

2 - YES, this is said in tag mode when you run in to another car (tag being the two player mode) it is so loud in comparison to the rest of the game!

3 - wooooo, the excitement of finishing a race, a game of collect or a game of tag results in this amazing noise.

find those responsible, and destroy them utterly...

not even the japanese were safe...

after writing this review I found that there is another, with a few screenshots, and an opinion very similar to mine, but without any swearing...it's here

please don't post these images or MP3's on other websites or FTP servers, or people will laugh at you.
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