PixlBit

Click here for the intro.

Click here for part 1.

Four of us on staff volunteered, for the lulz, to recieve a mystery game in the mail for review from Nick--all of them terrible--and document our experiences here on Pixlbit.

The first day I played almost 3 hours and gave myself some slight tennis elbow. My mind was set on getting gold on all cups to unlock the last cup, the only conceivable sense of accomplishment I could get out of it.

Early races are around 2.5 minutes, the longest are 4.5, which is an eternity. It's extra-motivating to win first as much as possible, because I sure as heck didn't want to do it over. I had to, several times, and it was never fun. I felt cheated by the AI, and I was never quite sure how. Driving carefully around turns seemed to help, but other times, slamming into a curve would fling the truck facing the right direction, without losing too much speed. The AI does this constantly, and is never punished, so I assume there's some rubberbanding involved.

How could this game be so bad when it had so many overseeing its development?

The only part that got me super cranky was in the jungle track at a turn near a slight hill. In early cups, the truck goes over the hill without a problem. In later cups the truck's max speed increases, which tends to send you airborne, a physics disaster. The game is so careful to never let vehicles overturn (there's no flip right-side-up button), that often when you go airborne or hit the invisible side wall, it starts turning in mid-air, so you will tend to be facing the wrong way once you land. It takes an actual 3-point turn to start going in the correct direction since the track is so thin, at which point you can kiss first place goodbye.

The weird thing is you can't really call that a glitch. It's just an artifact of a total lack of care. That must've been the policy for its development: NO EXTRA EFFORT WHATSOEVER. It looks like a late N64-era beta. There are no people anywhere, there's no mud splattering like you would hope from driving a big truck, no reflections on any part of the truck, and the backgrounds “tear” into existence like I haven't seen since days of old. The engine sounds the same whether you're going 30 or 115mph. Driving against the guardrails, at any speed, sounds like... static. Not annoying static; rather, like the long, uninterrupted static from a baby monitor. I can't tell you how weird it is going over a jump and landing without so much as a KA-CHUK. It's dead silent. And when you get bumped from behind, not even a little boost of speed.

Like I said in part 1, the menus are terrible. There's a picture of the remote on the screen:

green-dots-on means d-pad steering...

green arrows on the edge of the remote means motion-controlled steering.

And when you want to unpause, you have to point at the screen and press a button on the screen to unpause, instead of the pause button ON THE CONTROLLER. I don't have to tell you how irksome that is, yet, the game is so uneventful that suddenly turning the remote 90 degrees to unpause isn't an issue. The game is literally so bad that it doesn't matter how bad.

I'd like to take a moment and publicly ridicule the four people on Amazon who gave this thing an average 4.2 out of 5 stars:

I bought this game for my husband, because we love our Dodges. Just as I was hoping we played the game right away and loved it. It was nice to race each other in the family and have lots of fun.

By NANCY, who gave it FIVE stars

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 Fun: 4.0 out of 5 stars

This is very different from Mario Cart! Graphics are not as good, but they aren't bad once you get used to things popping up. For a driving game it's a lot of fun and they handle like trucks. We like it.

By dawgiemama

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Fun: 4.0 out of 5 stars

Got this for my kids who love Dodge trucks. They say it's fun, a little challenging, but just like any other racing game. Really only bought for the Dodge reason.

By Amazon Customer

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Fun: 4.0 out of 5 stars   

THIS GAME MAKES ME THINK THAT WAS LIKE HIS FRONT PAGE, "AMAZING" ,BUT ITS MORE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE... FOR CHILDS ITS EXC GAME NOT FOR OLDEST PEOPLE.

By Bryan Barboza

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Even though it came out 2.5years ago, I wanted Storm City Games to know THE TRUTH about RAM RACING so I gave checked out their website and...

Oh.

I decided to give them a heads up about the problem:

 

If anyone has had the misfortune of playing one of their games, their "consumer service department" rep seemed pretty helpful. They can be reached at: (856) 885-6912