Money, money, money...
Of course, all of this upgrading and modding costs money and racing is where you make the wonga to pay for your cars. Now, we already know that Juiced doesn’t require you to drive around a city looking for a glowing circle to race at so what Juiced has is a calendar. Marked on here are the various different races going on in the city and you flip along finding one you fancy having a crack at. This is all standard stuff with circuit racing, sprints and ‘show-off ‘races but where Juiced differs is that most races cost money to take part.
This isn’t too much of a problem to start off with as long as you’re frugal on what you spend on your car but if you lose you’ll find yourself out of pocket pretty sharpish… EVERYTHING costs in this game. When you’re racing you’ll invariably damage your car and afterwards that costs to repair or you’ll suffer performance losses in the next race. Plus you’ll need to keep your car regularly upgraded or others will nitrous past you while your clapped out, under maintained turbo sputters along. Have a particularly bad race and you could well find yourself further out of pocket than if you hadn’t even bothered entering. Now, none of this would be that much of a problem if it weren’t for two things. First, you can’t replay races as in NFS:U2… do badly and that’s it, you did badly, tough luck and move on. Second, the damn autosave makes sure that every stage of the game is saved, so if you thought you could re-load a game to have another crack, forget it… Juiced makes you pay for your mistakes and forces you to live with them.
And that, outside of the actual race engine itself, is the biggest problem with Juiced. I know that in real life you’d have to pay for everything, but that’s real life, Juiced is a racing game and I fail to see the fun in permanently struggling for cash. The calendar system for races is fine but being cash strapped means you’re left hunting around for free races to enter. As you get farther into the game those free races become rarer than a chav without a baseball cap, meaning you sit there skipping days and days just to find a race you can enter as you don’t have the dosh to pay the entry fees for any other races. Of course, you can always go for the ‘style’ type races where the point is to pull all sorts of flashy manoeuvres, but after your fifth one of these you start to wonder if you’ll ever be able to afford to actually race. After all, isn’t that the point of a racing game?
For those of us that are broke, Juiced does offer alternatives to racing so you don’t have to miss all the action. For a start, you can attend a race meet purely to bet on other drivers but again, this is a flawed and ultimately pointless exercise. Place your bet on a likely looking driver and then sit back and watch the race unfold… in real time… with no speed up function… or skip options. Yep, there’s no way to ‘fast forward’ through a race in progress, or skip to the end or even just have the computer figure out who won, skip the entire race and just let you know of your last few pennies have increased or been lost. I suggest running Juiced in a window, letting the race start and then going off and picking over the finer points of Indian tax returns in Excel before popping back to see what’s happened in the race. Either that or turn the computer off, go down to William Hill and place a real bet on a real race… it’s more fun than watching Juiced and possibly more rewarding too.
Another problem is the whole ‘crew’ thing that Juiced has bolted on. The idea here is to get a reputation which will eventually entice other drivers to become part of your crew, which is essentially like a race team. You can now enter these guys in races instead of driving yourself, so it’s a bit like a driving management sim. This would be fine except for one thing. The AI drivers on your team are possibly from the Stevie Wonder Driving School, or at best got all their training on the fairground dogems. For some reason any car you’re in or being driven by one of your crew will more often than not come off worst in a race track ‘rub’ with another car. While this isn’t so bad if you’re driving, you might as well just give up if it’s one of your crew behind the wheel. I’ve sat there screaming with frustration as my idiotic AI driver has been t-boned into the Armco to then reverse back across the track, get slammed by another car back into the Armco to then do the most ridiculous 27 point turn as he inches forwards and backwards rubbing his bumper up the railings before being able to motor off down the track. Stupid, stupid, stupid… and very, very annoying.