With Vivid graphics, Violent weapons, and swift Velocity, Micro Machines V3 has everything you could desire in a racing game. It's a complete racing simulation in a fully 3D environment where up to eight players can compete simultaneously.
The game involves micro machines that are tiny little racing cars, tanks, boats, and others tearing along on tracks made in the real world by a child (or a grown up who still plays like a kid). Each track is based on a theme such as the breakfast table, garden, beach, pond, lab, restaurant, school, etc. The roads have a wild and crazy layout and are different for each area or room you are in. For instance, the breakfast courses are made of pieces of cereal, the school tracks are made of chalk, the restaurant has peas and carrots, and the pond courses are made of grass growing in the water. Many obstacles lie in and around the courses as well. You'll find milk puddles and caramel spills to slow you down on the breakfast table, knives, forks, cell phones, wallets, wine glasses, napkins and more to bump into on the restaurant tables, and pens, books, and calculators in the school. Each course has a few power-ups on the sides that allow you to clobber, shoot, push or grab your opponents. There are even mines that you can drop in hopes that your opponents will run into them, however be careful and remember where you placed them as you can often find yourself running into your own mines.
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One nice feature of the game is all the jumps and bridges you'll have to master. In the restaurant you'll have fun driving over baguettes (French bread) that connect tables together. In school, these bridges become rulers, and at home you'll find ironing boards, cereal boxes, tarts, and skate boards to climb over.
There are 48 real-time 3D modelled circuits featured in the many different surroundings to race the 32 different types of 3D vehicles. Monster trucks, transmutable vehicles, futuristic cars, hovercrafts and more are just some of the cars and boats you'll have access to. All the original Micro Machine race drivers are back as well. You'll see Cherry, Joel, Spider, Walter, and others as life-like characters with motion and voices.
Cherry has set up a driving school where all the novices can get all the practice they require to race the different tracks. Cherry will make sure you understand what she has taught you and won't allow you to continue on to the next lesson unless she is completely satisfied with your performance. She has all the tracks set up just like a driving school with cones for you to swerve around.
When you begin the game, you'll have a tiny car to drive around to make all your different selections. Little roads leading to car washes and garages in which you make you selections, it's almost like a small game in itself. There are over ten different options to choose from when playing the game. Some of the game options include a head-to-head event, challenge, and time trials. Time trials will take you through all the tracks individually with no computer or human opponents as you try to obtain the fastest laps in each. Whenever you replay a race, you'll have the fastest track time marked by a ghost car which will give you an idea of how far ahead or behind you are getting. Multi-player modes have options such as tournaments, single races, team modes, party play modes, knockouts, and much more. MM V3 is fun whether you are just one person all alone, or up to a party of eight. With just two joysticks, you are able to play up to four players as the joystick can be held by two players at the same time, each with their own controls. It's a different method of playing and your vehicles accelerates constantly since you no longer have any buttons to control the speed. Otherwise, when you have the whole joystick to yourself, you can accelerate, break, jump in the air, honk your horn or use a special power-up weapon.
Special "prize cars" are won whenever you beat a Time Trial single race or by completing a group in one of the other modes. These cars can be saved along with your character on a memory card and can be used in the Test Drive mode and the Keepsies mode where players play their cars in order to win the ones from their friends.
A stats mode will provide you with all the stats you could want to view in the game from player records, time trial stats, to test drive stats, they are all there. If you have a score you want to register in the Micro Machines V3 Hall of Fame, Codemasters has set up a page on their website.
Sound effects are provided with each scene, with the restaurant scene being the most realistic and noisy of them all. A recording probably made within a real restaurant will be played and lasts a full two minutes before repeating. You can enjoy just trying to make out what the many people you hear are talking about. Of course, there are your vehicle noises and sounds for each object that you can bump into on the road. Napkins are quiet, while cell phones will ring, and frogs in the pond will croak at you as you pass them by.
Written by Trevor Bennicke
Click here for screen shots.
Web site: Codemasters
E-mail: Codemasters Technical Support
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