Wacky Races (NES Review)
November 9, 2023 Leave a comment
Wacky Races
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Atlus
First Released December 25, 1991
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Good sprite work. Weird subject matter.
Like Yo! Noid from earlier this week, the protagonist of the NES Wacky Races is miscast. I’ve never actually seen a single episode of the show. I wouldn’t even be born until 21 years after it debuted, and they weren’t showing reruns of it when I was in my cartoon-watching prime. Or, if they were, I wasn’t really interested in old cartoons. But, even I know that Muttley is (along with Dick Dastardly) unambiguously the villain of Wacky Races. Oh, and don’t take it personally, Hanna-Barbera fans. I never watched the Flintstones, either. I also never watched the Jetsons. I was bored silly by Scooby-Doo, and I still am. The one and only Hanna-Barbera series I did enjoy was Laff-A-Lympics, but that’s NOT Muttley in that show. It’s Mumbly, a clone of Muttley created because, apparently, another company co-owned Wacky Races. Not just any company, but one that created game shows (Hollywood Squares being their most famous one). Wacky Races was created to be a game show/cartoon hybrid where children would wager on who would win each race. Then some executive came to their senses and said “we’re doing a sort of child-friendly sports gambling show?” The game show segment was dropped, but they liked all the concepts for the characters and turned it into its own cartoon that wouldn’t introduce children to the fun of sports betting. And, 23 years later, that cartoon was turned into a generic NES game. BUT, a pretty good one. At least for the younger set.
I appreciate that all the levels have different themes. They didn’t phone-in the graphics at all. Now, the level layouts? Well..
There’s ZERO racing in Wacky Racers. Strange as this sounds, the NES game is a totally pedestrian platformer. Taking the role of Muttley, you make your way through ten stages, collecting bones and gems. There’s no real twist in the formula, either. The only non-platforming stage is a swimming level that’s every bit as cinchy as the rest of the game. Wacky Races might be the most easy game of its type on the NES. I only lost one life the entire time, and it was to a cheaply placed enemy that sprang-up over an instakill pit. That enemy could have gotten me twenty-five more times and I would have still beaten Wacky Racers with plenty of lives to spare. I’ll say this about it: it would make for an ideal first platforming game for young children. Like, ages 6 to 8. Wacky Races controls great, it has some fun character designs, and it’s EASY.
I don’t know why Atlus didn’t just give you the ability to pick any of the ten levels, since the stages aren’t necessarily thematically connected. Instead, it divides the game into three.. um.. circuits? But, each level with the circuit feels like its own self-contained stage, with its own theme. Each of the ten stages ends in a boss fight as well. There’s no finale after you beat all the stages on the map. Once you’ve cleared the final level, no matter which one it is, the credits roll. Oh, and it lets you know that all of your plans were foiled and Dirk lost the race. Heh. That made me laugh. It’d be like defeating Bowser only for the game to reveal Peach had taken a restraining order out on Mario.
The power-up system is the only slightly atypical bump in the road. When the game first starts, Muttley can only do a bite move that has a limited range. He also only has three hit points and he can’t do a Racoon Mario-like floating move. To change this, you have to collect bones. Just one is enough to move the item cursor in the status bar. It looks like this:
The first item is the bomb that has a limited range and takes a while to throw. The second is a bark that travels nearly the full length of the screen. The third is the Racoon Mario-like “pump the jump button to slowly float downward” thing, and the final item is life. Both the weapons and the life are absurdly overpowered. The bones are EVERYWHERE in the stages, so it only takes about halfway through the first stage to fully charge-up Muttley with the bark, six health, and the floater. In theory, the weapons would work better if they were a limited-usage situation. 20 seconds. 30 seconds. Maybe as low as 15. Nope. Once you activate them, they’re yours until you die. And you won’t die a whole lot. This is especially true thanks to how the hearts work. You can add three hearts to your total every 4th bone you pick up. After that, every time you activate the heart, you get a FULL health refill every time you activate it. Once I picked-up on the fact that every boss chamber has a bone in it, I’d leave the meter on the third slot, then grab the bone in the boss chamber and move the meter over to the health refill. I’d essentially have eleven hits to take down the bosses. If the heart refilled one point at a time, Wacky Races would certainly be one of the best and most balanced platformers on the NES. Instead, it’s like baby’s first platformer, and it has NO tension or stakes.
I only used the bombs once, and that’s when I died on this level. They suck. Stick with the bark.
But, as a leisurely, completely forgettable jaunt through average-but-quality platforming stages and tropes, Atlus could have done a lot worse. The levels are basic, but occasionally the developers got weird. My old arch nemesis, slippery ice levels, makes an appearance. But, after you get past the first section of that stage, the ice vanishes and suddenly the level is made entirely of clouds that act like trampolines. So, you spend an extended section of Wacky Races bouncing off everything like Muttley both did an entire mountain of cocaine and drank about fifty Red Bulls. Sadly, that’s the only section of the game that really goes off the beaten-path of platforming cliches. Hell, even the clouds are pretty cliche-y.
The hypothetical other hook for Wacky Races would be the ten boss battles against the other stars of the TV show. They’re all here, along with their vehicles. But, none of them have their own unique personalities. In fact, they all feel kind of samey. They’re generic bosses that follow predictable attack patterns as they hop around their chambers spitting nearly identical projectiles at you. Besides some of them being in the correct settings, there’s no connection at all to the TV show, in attitude or behavior. For example: on the TV show, one of the characters has a car that transforms into anything that moves. That doesn’t happen in the game. It doesn’t transform at all, in fact. There’s no haunted house trope for the spooky Gruesome Twosome, and the army guys aren’t in an army-themed level. Really, these could have been any characters from any game. There is literally nothing about Wacky Racers that makes it feel connected to the show besides how the sprites are drawn. Again though, besides the fact that all the bosses are spongy as all hell (and one of them is fought on quicksand, which was REALLY annoying), they’re fun battles! I guess!
This game could have been any property and it’d make as much sense. The more I learned about the TV show, the more I became convinced that Atlus had already created a ten level template for a generic licensed game, and Wacky Races just happened to be the property they were able to get. It sounds like a recipe for disaster, but actually, it’s a pretty decent little NES game. It’s not AMAZING or anything, but the controls are damn near perfect, the level design is alright, and the whole thing only takes about an hour to finish. At the same time, there’s absolutely nothing memorable about it besides the fact that it’s underrated. I first played it back in June of 2020 and I literally remembered NOTHING about it except that I wondered why it wasn’t a more popular game. As I replayed it, what made me shake my head in disbelief most was the fact that, generic as it is, nothing about Wacky Races was phoned-in. The sheer variety of set pieces and enemies is gobsmacking for this type of game from this era on this console. Look at all the different facades they created:
And it ultimately won me over. Given the complete lack of connection to the TV series, Wacky Races for the NES should come across as really cynical, and it doesn’t. It’s damn charming. Yea, it’s too easy, but I’m of the opinion that it’s always preferable for a game to be too easy than too hard, because at least everyone can experience it that way. Wacky Races is ACHING for adjustable difficulty. It wouldn’t be hard to turn this into one of the best games on the NES. It just needs the item system readjusted. Or, alternatively, just reduce the amount of bones and 1ups (which are literally just laying around levels) in the stages. Oh, it would still be totally generic and completely unrelated to the cartoon series, but it would also be among the best platform games on a console defined by platform games. Wacky Races might not be the most shiny hidden gem, but it sparkles nonetheless.
Verdict: YES!
Indie Gamer Chick 
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