Preview: X-Car Experimental Racer© Dan Finkelstein
Apr 15, 1997
With "X-Car: Experimental Racer", Bethesda seemingly wanted to lure a small chunk of the race car simulation group of gamers away from their various Papyrus games, namely Indycar 2 and Nascar 2. X-Car tries hard, but unfortunately does not rise to the same level that IndyCar or Nascar have already obtained.X-Car, which has been in development for what seems like an eternity, uses a modified version of the engine used for the popular duo of games, "Terminator: Future Shock," and its follow-up, "SkyNet." While the engine was great for the 3-D worlds of the Terminator, it coverts rather poorly to a vanilla racing game. The graphics, while nice in high-resolution, are incredibly slow, even on a Pentium 90 with 32 megs of RAM. In the lower resolutions, the textures seemingly blend together, which can make picking out the curve of a road a tad difficult -- I found myself ramming head-on into walls on more than one occasion. The "experimental" cars (although I don't see anything experimental about them -- they just look like race cars), are made up of about a dozen polygons, each plastered with their own corporate sponsors. While the game ships with about a dozen tracks, the ones in the pre-release version are nothing to write-home about.
Probably the best aspect of X-Car is the state-of-the-art sound engine, which accurately reproduces all the sounds of racing. The doppler effect is modeled particularly nicely, as oncoming cars will increase then decrease in pitch as they pass you. The game also uses stereo effects better than any other racing game to date that I've played, with sound moving from speaker to speaker. I could have done without the audio cues from your pit crew, however, which warn you when another car comes within view. The cues either come too early, or way too late, as in, after I already hit the car. (SMASH! "Car to your Left!" "Gee, thanks.")
The problem with X-Car isn't that it's a bad game, but other games, mainly the ones from Papyrus, do the same thing, and do it better. Maybe if X-Car came out two years ago it would have been considered revolutionary, but today it's old hat. For example, when you crash in Nascar 2 they've got flipping cars, bouncing tires, visible damage, and the like. However, when you crash in X-Car, shards of polygons fly into the air, and your car spins around on the ground. Big deal.
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