Old Spice Racers Impressions

Somewhat inexplicably, Old Spice – yes, the deodorant – are currently running a competition with a grand prize of $60,000 for bedroom XNA coders to build a title loosely based on or around their musky scent. Old Spice Racers, is one of a current three entries gracing Xbox Live Indie Games, sharing virtual shelf space with Newton Vs. The Horde and The Fresh Card Game. Monkeytrap Games were nice enough to hand us a copy to play, gratis.

Players take control of one of a selection of characters, each animated using a jerky palmful of cartoon frames and tasked with steering their unicycle headlong through an embarrassingly limited time trial track. Occasionally traversing loops as if playing a clunkily fan-made Sonic clone, players can boost (although with limited and unexplained regularity), jump to activate trigger-led 360 degree spins and get confused by the near silent audio presentation and copy-paste recurring backdrops.

After rolling across a third stage of near mirrored design and barbershop pole track, my brother, ever the sarcastic onlooker, summed up my entire experience in a single line: “What I like is the variety.”

Despite offering glimmers of change in a half-pipe trick stage (which sadly results in little more than boosting into the sky, holding the trigger to throw the unicycle in depressingly slow, fixed speed death spin and hoping you land on your wheels), a track-editor, and, SURPRISE, an utterly dead multiplayer race component*, there is nothing really to Old Spice Racers.

The title’s press release claims that the team have “leverage[d] the graphic and processing power available on the Xbox 360″ in order to “update the fun” of early 2D racers. Though its strangest boast comes from suggesting that “customizable controller layouts” are in some way original or an exciting yet underlooked feature of XBLIG games. Players are encouraged to play around with the controller layouts, offering exciting levels of personalization swapping the jump command from the face button to the trigger and back again.

Old Spice Racers is not as good as Uniracers on the SNES, nor a patch on Go Go Unicycle, a game made in historically clunky The Games Factory by my then thirteen year old school friend Jonathan Dunn. The directional controls shift in function when traversing loops in a way that’s less intuitive than the now double-decade old Sonic the Hedgehog; Stages start with an agonisingly drawn out five light traffic tower; The trick system is basically non-existent and included only to boost the zaniness of the reasonably well designed cartoon character artwork.

This is a game and a competition to avoid and a repeat blight on a service dangerously close to offering a quality alternative to independent PC release. Put simply, there is nothing spicy about this mono-cyclic, mono-dimensioned, shockingly priced advergame aberration.

*A small note: XBLIG developers – PLEASE stop bothering with online modes outside of high score tables. There are too many multiplayer titles, both retail and digitally distributed, of higher production value vying for gamers’ time. Coupled with a startlingly crowded release schedule, you must come to accept that Boost-me-up Dual Stick Generic Space Fighter will not attract the attention of Modern Warfare 2.