Video Games Suck - Hot Rod: Garage to Glory

Redneck entertainment hits a new time low, one even Deer Hunter envies.

Ah, Valu-Soft. The bastion of all games shit, comprised of a bunch of people who've read 'learn virtual c++ in 21 days' and now believe they're ready to take on the big-world of computer games with their newfound knowledge.

If you've developed some sort of mental disorder of extreme pussiness that disallows you to understand sarcasm, it means: This game sucks, crybaby.

Graphics: Come on, take a guess. This game looks like it was made back in '94 (I will now use car model-style year shortenings in this article. And there's nothing you can do about it.), but only if '94 was in fact '49 with the little chrome numbers swapped around.

The car models, the most visually important part of any racing game, look they belong to a two-person quake 2 TC hosted on a tripod domain, with about as many polygons per peiceofcrap as the paddle from pong, and half the time they're not even remotely similar to the car they're supposed to be based on - I don't remember when a '68 challenger resembled a pair of spiked anal beads, but apparently this games' modelling team does!

Sound: The sound makes baby jesus cry. I believe there is a grand total of three sound effects - the 'burnout' effect (which sounds like the lamentations of the damned), the 'engine' effect (which I believe is a vaccuum cleaner on full speed), and the 'your car just fucking exploded, you lost a redneck game you useless fuck' sound effect, which is a bonus one you only get if your car sucks as much as this game.

Gameplay: After choosing one of the peice of craps from the junkyard (for some reason, the junkyard you visit seems to charge $2500 US for a rusted, broken-ass monte carlo with a rubber band engine that belongs in a corolla), you use your left over spare change to attach whatever sort of lasers and/or 'engine upgrades' you can to your car to get it's maximum speed from "0 mp/h" all the way up to "-2 mp/h" After this, you're ready to race - kind of.

You see, in the interests of attracting the coveted 'fucktard' audience, the geniuses at valu-soft decided that before you race a quarter-mile, you have to do a burnout to 'increase traction'. This sad, sad affair boils down to holding the accelerator key when the game tells you, and cackling in retarded glee as a shitload of particles that look like they're created by a group of vietnamese illegal immigrants who smuggled themselves into the country inside particularly lumpy sacks of rice. After you've succesfully dropped your FPS to the low zeroes from the nonexistant engine's terrible handling of particles, you're ready to engage in the most un-good racing experience of your life.

You then use the terrible driving controls to slowly roll up to the line. However, if so much as a single molecule of your car passes beyond the line, you will instantly lose the race. Owing to the way your car behaves like a rhinocerous going down a waterslide, this will only happen about 102% of the time.

Once you've lucked out and ended up on the line, you must then accelerate muchly when the light turns green. Thankfully, the 'accelerate muchly' key you've crushed during the stupidly unneccesary burnout sequence will possibly still work, so the race will be relatively uneventful.

If you win, you can take your amazing prize of $20 bucks and use it to begin saving up for that ever-prized set of wheels (bringing the total number of wheels your car has all the way up to 4), or perhaps even a game that doesn't suck! Since if you race for anything more than $20 bucks your opponent will completely destroy you and possibly rape your pets and children, getting any sort of upgrades in this game only requires, oh.... 52,502^pi races to be able to afford yourself some kickass cupholders.

Speaking of which - valu-soft has taken the vehicle upgrade system, usually a system which doesn't totally suck and might actually increase a game's appeal for up to a full 3.2 seconds, and done the impossible - made it suck more than a jet engine at the bottom of a drainpipe.

For one, you are NEVER told just what the damn upgrades you can buy will actually do. That 12,000 dollar, top-of-the-line engine? It'll raise your horsepower by a whopping 3 points. Yet those 10 dollar sparkplugs will raise your horsepower by at least 80..... Good to know that hotrod has succesfully sponsored a game created by people with absolutely no fucking clue about cars.

Secondly, most of the upgrades, besides the aforementioned wonder sparkplugs, can only increase your car power... with the MAGICAL POWER of LET'S PRETEND!

Yes, that's correct. Many of the upgrades simply do nothing at all, stealing your hard earned hick money and giving you a peice of shit that makes you wish for your own death.

And if you were thinking this couldn't get any worse, then you're wrong, jackass, and should castrate yourself so your moronic offspring can not pollute the world.

There is only ONE type of track in this game - the quarter-mile, and like the rest of the game, it looks like shit. Apparently putting a curve or two into one of the tracks was too much for the games' developers, as every track in the game is a perfectly straight quartermile, and no matter what surface you're on it has all the traction of lineoeum wrapped in teflon.

Score: A nice, round -72/10 would do finely here. But the combonation of ruining any sort of reputation Hot Rod might of had, along with the intense redneck values portrayed in this game, earn it an outstanding DerekSmart/10, which scientists themselves cannot express in notation because it's so low.