Juiced

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Amazon

Not Quite Juicy Enough

I give up. Apparently I’m not going to find a better racing game than Burnout 3 until the next edition of the Burnout series comes along. Never have I played a smoother, more exciting, and let’s not forget downright fast racing game in all my gaming years. Plus it has a hell of an online mode. Since I’ve been playing that fantastic title, I’ve been in search of other racing thrills to quench my speed thirst. Nothing has come close. Not even THQ’s recently released Juiced.

Apparently Juiced was beset by release date problems when original publisher Acclaim went down the tubes. Ah, Acclaim. If no one else misses you, I surely will, as I know we had a lot of fun together during many of my console gaming days, especially those golden Super Nintendo years. But anyway, THQ picked up the title and finally released the game in June. However, I’m not sure that Juiced would have been any better had it been released last year or even later this year. Underneath all the shiny packaging is just another rehashing of the same old same old.

Specifically I’m thinking of Gran Turismo and Midnight Club Racing. Juiced takes the garage aspects of the former game, and dumbs them down completely (which, honestly isn’t a bad thing, as I was never one to really get into the mechanics of tinkering with my car) and combines them with the trying to win rivals’ cars aspect of the latter. Granted, in Midnight Club you never lost your own car as you weren’t racing for pink slips, but the point is that there’s nothing new offered here.

Juiced strains hard to be hip. This is, after all, the world of illegal street racing, but after a while it feels no more exciting than the dull world of NASCAR. I mean, you get to pick out what brand of cell phone you want to own at the beginning of the game. I thought winning the other players’ cars would be enough bling to carry around, but apparently not. What the hell do I care if I get to use a virtual Motorola or Samsung phone in a game? It’s not like they had different features and better rate packages. I thought this game was supposed to be about racing, not how pimped out I am.

Some people enjoy the minutia that comes with some of these racing titles, but not me. I’ve always been about getting behind the wheel and stomping the gas. While Juiced does offer that experience, at its core it’s nothing more than a money game. Sort of like Gran Turismo (again) in that you’ll be selling off some of your cars, which inevitably start wearing down and costing more in the repair department. Some cars you win on Juiced are complete hunks of junk, but you’ll be faced with the task of souping some of them up so you can race in various class tournaments and special events.

Aside from the money factor, there’s respect. Now this is an aspect of Juiced that I do find interesting. Depending on how well you do and how groovy your car is, you will gain respect points from your rivals who will eventually invite you to come race with them, or challenge you to pink slip contests. Indeed, this is the only innovation that Juiced offers in the end, but it’s not enough to keep the game afloat. Especially when you have to make sure that you don’t crash into other players. Talk about a drag! If you do, then you wind up losing respect points and have to pay their repair bill. What kind of racing game is one where you can’t trade a little paint?

Suffice it to say that Juiced has more to do with MTV’s Pimp My Ride than racing. Another nonsensical part is when you’re tricking out your car and you can choose a line of sound systems to install. Go ahead and choose any, because I didn’t find that it made a damn bit of difference if I went with the $1000 dollar system, or one of the lower end models. When I was chided by one rival for having won and raced with another rival’s supposed piece of junk car, I tricked it out like crazy and she still wasn’t happy. Again, this kind of silliness should be secondary in a racing game, especially if it’s not going to matter in the least at the end of the day.

It would be nice to say that Juiced succeeds on some level here, but it doesn’t. It’s not fast enough to be exciting, and it’s way too repetitive in its money-based mechanics. To put it succinctly, though, any racing game that basically puts libido before the wheel is doomed to fail, and Juiced is that game.