Parking Garage Rally Circuit

A long time ago, when I was a little kid, games didn't look like they do today. Edge smoothing and realistic shadows weren't on the menu - no, it was all about the angular 3D models. Not knowing any better, or realising it could look any other way, they were more than happy. The games looked good back then too, but looking back on those games now is a nostalgia trip instead. Starting, say, Colin McRae Rally on the PlayStation 1 sends me back to the good old days. When I played Parking Garage Rally Circuit (fantastic name, by the way), the nostalgia of those times has slowly resurfaced and for a little while I'm back to the sweet nineties and the trouble-free days of childhood.

Parking Garage Rally Circuit is a clear homage to games like Sega Rally, Crazy Taxi and Mario Kart 64. When you first start the game, you get to choose which format you want to emulate through four different graphical styles. I chose the last option, the PC port, as the others became a little too grainy for my already poor eyesight. But the homage is manifested not only through the gorgeous graphic style and the flickering CRT filter, but also through the soundtrack. The soundtrack is one of the great pleasures of the game. Each track is accompanied by its own song and they really sound old, but in the right way, this from a retro-flirty perspective and they fit perfectly into the era the game reflects. The game's menu music, on the other hand, drove me crazy pretty quickly, but that's a minor point when you look at the lyrics and everything else that made me angry (insanely angry) during my hours with Parking Garage Rally Circuit.

Despite the rally element in the name, these are regular races with two laps, but where the laps often differ quite a bit. However, they are filled with ramps and jumps, sometimes a bit of gravel and even snow - so there will be a bit of rallying too, after all. The controls are simple and quite reminiscent of Mario Kart - drift around corners, build up boost and keep drifting until the boost runs out to do boost combos. Get it right and you'll soon be literally flying through the tracks. The car physics are very arcadey, completely lacking in realism and therefore in no way reminiscent of Sega Rally despite the obvious references to that game. Your car feels very light, a bit like it's made of taped together moving boxes and papier-mâché. At first, you have a car to drive. You can choose the colour, the pattern and the number of your car - not much, but enough. The presentation is vintage and simple, the menus are easy to navigate but the tutorial video is a slight minus as it only shows the keyboard control scheme - which doesn't help me when playing on a ROG Ally. The game fits well in handheld format, with a small screen, for sure.

The courses offer views of famous American and British sites. You visit Mount Rushmore and jump over the Statue of Liberty. There's nothing wrong with the surroundings, but you don't have time to take them in when you're driving a rally car at 120 knots and they're relegated to the periphery. There are eight different tracks in total, which feels a bit stingy. Local multiplayer is another element that would have fit well. The only multiplayer component in Parking Garage Rally Circuit is the ability to race against other players' times. That is, nothing that happens in real time.

Occasionally, for very brief moments, the game is almost a joy to play. You manage to chain together a really nice boost combo and fly forward and past the opponent's ghosts. There is a bronze, silver and gold ghost you meet and you have to beat them to unlock new tracks and cars. If you beat the bronze ghost on all tracks, you unlock the next car and then the same thing with the car after that. If you then beat the gold ghost, you unlock the ability to race against, as mentioned earlier, real opponents' times - but I never got there. Let me explain why.

I have rarely, if ever, been as angry as when I played Parking Garage Rally Circuit. I can't think of a game that has treated me worse or been more unfair. There are many reasons for this and the first is how the ghosts I encounter take seemingly impossible routes across the tracks. On one of them there are ramps leading to another part of a car park. I follow closely behind them, feeling fast and hopeful that I'll be able to overtake them on the next bend - but then they skip the ramp and go to the right of it instead. I do the same, but not with the same results as my ghost antagonists. They make an elegant, precise and perfect jump while I crash to my death into the concrete foundation under the floor they landed on. No, of course I have to take a different route, a detour in comparison, to get through the lanes when they do what they want. Speaking of jumps, there's another thing I've been screaming my head off about. Imagine a scenario where you're in the lead, you're in a good position, you've navigated all the checkpoints well, and you come to a big cool ramp. You leave the ground, to the sound of sweet music, and you're just going to make up ground to win and continue to the finish - but then you land a nanometre wrong and the car is thrown into an advanced Australian breakdancing routine and you have to press "restart."

Restart is by far the button I pressed most in the game's menus. Firstly, it takes several runs through the courses to memorise the levels. They are unforgiving and require millimetre precision for you to have a chance of winning. If you happen to crash into one of all the cars that are thematically parked on all the game's levels, you just have to start over, over and over again. As I mentioned earlier, the second lap can be quite different from the first. On one of the tracks, lightning strikes and the power goes out. After that, you have to navigate in pitch black darkness, with only the car's extremely poor headlights illuminating the road and the arrows showing which direction to drive. I almost cringed and threw in the towel, but in the end I guessed right and passed the course, on the umpteenth attempt. On another track there are boulders falling seemingly at random across the road, another is full of murderous snowploughs and then there's that damn garage with the barriers folding up and down. If you have the patience, the variety might be fun, but it certainly wasn't my cup of tea. Maybe I'm too old for muscle memory, or just memory in general, to handle the information that needs to be processed quickly to succeed in the Parking Garage Rally Circuit.

It's basically an okay game, at least if you look at its graphics, music and presentation. The graphics are actually incredibly charming and reflect the era very well. The music is also one of the game's big pluses (one of the few, unfortunately) and the tuneful ska tones are genuinely pleasant to listen to. The presentation is simple but accurate and could easily have been found in a game from the nineties. But then I don't have much else positive to say. For a short while I have fun, when for once things go well for me. If it had continued like that without me being brutally punished time and time again, I'm sure there would have been a nice and addictive little game in there somewhere. But overall, I've only found games for people who are more than happy to engage in and love self-torture.