Tiny cars... numerous niggles
If anyone claims that Micro Machines V4 is anything other than an arcade racer, I’ll slap them with my boxed Dinky Routemaster Bus. It’s all about getting around the track as quick as you can. There’s a few different types of races to be had and you work you way through each one with a win in one race unlocking the next. Complete all the races of a particular ilk to unlock the next set and complete all the sets in a league to unlock the next league. Simple, eh?
Well…no. Although the idea is solid enough, the actual races themselves are a bit of a mixed bag with everything from graphical glitches, camera angles and dodgy AI working in harmony to spoil what should’ve been a lot of fun. Don’t get me wrong, Micro Machines V4 is still a playable game but it could’ve been so much better.
First off, no matter what drivers I try or whether I run SLI or just a single card, there’s some z-buffer issues that, at times, can obscure your car during a race. The view in Micro Machines V4 is a sort of top-down look, but with a spinny rotaty camera that zooms in and out of the action, (more on that later). The graphics problem comes in only on certain levels, such as the chicken coop and roadworks maps. For some odd reasons a large texture, that appears aligned with the car, pops up through the racing surface and at times obscures your vision and the rest of the time is just plain annoying.
But the dodgy z-buffering is the least of your worries compared to the camera which can make a straight forward race range anywhere from confusing to outright bloody irritating. With the ‘getting a screen ahead’ being central to winning, you can understand that the camera needs to be intelligent enough to cope with four cars all doing their whacky thing. Given the large size of the backdrops though, you’ll find that camera swinging around to leave your view neatly obscured by a chair leg or something as daft. This happens most frequently on sharp bends when most need to see where you’re going.
Even more annoying is that should you pull ahead of the other cars, you’re presented with an increasingly restricted view of the road ahead as the camera pulls out to keep the other cars in view. Often, unless you’ve learnt the tracks, you’ll make an error because you can’t see where you’re going, everyone screams past and it's you who loses the points. Gah!
