Wacky Wheels

Wacky Wheels is an arcade-kart racing game released by Apogee Software in 1994 for MS-DOS only. In this game, you can play any of eight wacky animals. As you can imagine, Super Mario Kart strongly inspired the game.

When you think of kart racing games, what game do you think of? Depending on the console you grew up on, most will say Super Mario Kart. I know many will also feel of Crash Team Racing. Even though they are the most well-known (undoubtedly the best), many other games have taken a similar path.

Wacky Wheels is one of them. Beavis Scott developed the game, which Apogee Software published in 1994.

A curious fact is that after the developers created Wacky Wheels "inspired" by Super Mario Kart, they sent a copy to Copysoft. Believe it or not, they included the source code too. Copysoft rejected the game, but the company lived up to its name and released Skunny Kart, an almost identical match. Naturally, the developers of Wacky Wheels got angry but did not file legal charges. In the end, what did you expect if you sent your source code to a company called "Copysoft"?

The adventure is about different animals getting into go-karts and racing each other. Do you think there is a plot? Well no, deal with it. The adventure has many game modes that are suspiciously similar to Super Mario Kart. If you have any doubt about this, compare the Wacky shoot-out mode with the Battle Mode of the Nintendo game. During races, players can also attack their rivals by throwing hedgehogs or bombs and receive other items to gain an advantage in its multiple tracks. Nevertheless, the game has some interesting details, such as a very complete instruction manual in the menu or a cameo of Dopefish from Commander Keen. Also, although it is an obvious feature of these games, it has a multiplayer mode that is always welcome.

Graphically it looks quite lovely, the colors are very lively and vivid. The tracks are all the same, and the subtle color change in the different tracks will not change my mind. The map was not to my liking either; you can't see the characters well, and since the camera is very close to the character, you can hardly see the other competitors. However this didn't bother me too much, the game itself is short enough for me to get bored of the maps. The music is okay, a bit too loud for my taste, but it fits well with the title.

Despite my criticisms with Wacky Wheels, I can at least say that it is entertaining. As time went on I found more and more things to criticize, but always playing the races and trying to win them, and that's very positive. Want to give it a try? Don't waste any more time! You can play it now, at least it's more original than Skunny Kart.