This game's series has been out longer than I've even used a
computer. It retains the top-down, racer view from the previous
installments of Micro Machines with all of the inherent features
of such a design. The game supports single, multi, time
challenge, and a few other such modes of play. I saw about 6
"areas" to play in with about 5 tracks for each type of area so
perhaps 30 tracks in all.
This game has 3d luckily, which helps out somewhat with
speed and image quality. If anything, the game runs too fast
although I'm not sure if that's a property of having voodoo 2 or
just by design. The tracks are sparse to say the least. One of
the tracks lays out the suggested road with carrots and peas as
guidelines but the carrots and peas are not solid polygonal
objects. Instead they are flat textures laid on top of the flat
racing surface. All of the tracks are totally flat without any hills
or valleys to vary the terrain. This game has that simple,
colorful game that you might expect from such a title but it's
really too simple. For the amount of hardware the average
gamer has these days, this game is very bare-bones. There
aren't any lighting effects or weather effects and most things
use simple gourad shading with some things being textured.
The water level has pond ripples, but the detail is so low that
you can see actual pixels in the ripples. The water level should
have had waves and water spray from the boats but instead it
just has a reflection map and a slight wave displacement at the
back of the boats. The sandbox levels are again, flat and
undetailed. To see a game that really does the graphics right,
check out Ignition, which came out about 6 months ago. It has
multiple levels, weather and intricate detail. MM3 is last years
technology at best.
I can barely remember the ho-hum sound effects in Micro
Machines 3. Nothing exciting or ground breaking here. The
music is cheaply composed midi files. My soundcard has 8
megs of ram for midi samples but these sound like something
from the soundblaster 16 era. Big snooze all around in the
sound category.
This games "fun factor", did one major divebomb for me.
Initially, I was quite entertained by this title, but after just a few
tracks I could tell this had shovelware written all over it. I
found the control way too touchy with a gamepad, which is
odd since I would think that this would be the ideal way to
play. The game is also really childish in fact and that alone will
turn off most gamers. The graphics, although supporting 3D
cards, are plain and lacking any attention to detail that other
games exhibit these days. Even the menu system annoys me in
this game. You go through 3 startup screens, a movie clip, and
5 setup screens just to race a track. I would really like it if
games would lay off on the pre-game crap that they seem to
feel is so necessary. Who cares who the maker is after the 50th
time of starting a game? Just go straight to the game and let
me play, that's what I want. If you want good top-down racing,
get IGNITION.