Checkered Flag Review (Atari Jaguar, 1994)

The Atari Jaguar boasted 3D graphics which even at the time were largely unimpressive. The Panasonic 3DO was rendering more polygons than the most technically sound Jaguar titles, and even the SuperFX chip made some 16-bit SNES titles comparable. Atari was also a well known copycat. They saw something that works and ran with their own version. Who can blame them? That’s basically the video game industry in a nutshell. So when Sega’s Virtua Racing was making waves Atari decided to basically copy the formula by updating one of their retro titles for the new console. Checkered Flag was the result. Unfortunately it suffers from many of the same issues that plague so many other Atari Jaguar releases.

I’m just going to state the obvious straight away. Checkered Flag is not a good game. It’s not even a fun time. What it is however, is a perfect example of the growing pains developers faced when developing early 3D titles. It’s a polygonal racer with a behind the car perspective where you compete against a set number of racers on a variety of tracks. The first thing I noticed is just how much Checkered Flag feels like a demo. For one thing there are only three gameplay options. There’s you have single race, free play, and tournament. Honestly there’s not that much difference between the three modes with tournament being the outlier.

Checkered Flag is mostly just a game where you set parameters for the race, and then play. Normally I’m all for a simple approach but here it just feels like the game was slapped together. Like a tech demo of sorts. Thankfully in single race and free run you’re given a lot of different options. You can select the course, weather effects, number of gears, transmission type, number of competing racers, how many laps, and even if your tires are wet or dry. Admittedly that’s a ton of customization for each race, and even to this day I haven’t seen a game of this kind where you can so finely tune your play experience. Some of the selections don’t make sense such as having wet tires. I mean, that should be weather dependent, right? Regardless it’s insane, especially for a 64-bit title.

While it all sounds nice it still feels like the game is really lacking in content overall. Sure you can fine tune your races to make them feel slightly different, but in the end, it doesn’t make a huge difference. Tournament mode is the highlight but I’m a little disappointed that you can’t change the options in it. Ten laps is too long for a race here.

This brings me to my next point. The tracks are a little boring and bland. There’s no hills or environmental hazards to speak of. This is a polygonal 3D title so I seriously doubt the hardware was too limited for this. I mean even Cybermorph had mountains and hills you could interact with, and that one was even free roaming. In Checkered Flag the tracks are just flat. Sure there’s mountains off to the side, but those are inaccessible. At least there are tunnels, but these are few and far between.

That brings me to the design of these courses. They’re okay, but far from stellar. You have a lot of straightaways, and most of the turns aren’t particularly challenging. There are ten of these tracks (which is a pretty decent number actually) but they don’t really feel different enough from one another. The theming for them is decent in theory. You have deep woods, a gorge, seaside, an arctic course, and more. The problem is that many don’t look that different visually from one another. Most of these tracks kind of look like mountainous deserts. I mean that’s fine and dandy, but why offer ten if you can’t make all of them at least visually different?

There’s something seriously wrong with the physics too. Turning feels both too loose and too responsive at the same time. I had a tough time dealing with this because I was constantly over correcting and smacking into the track edges. It’s not a good time. You also have to worry about occasionally getting turned around which feels easier than in most other racers. A few well placed bounces off of a barrier and you’ll be facing the wrong way. Unfortunately the game doesn’t indicate this to you. Due to the choppy graphics and animations there were a few times I didn’t even notice I was going the wrong way until running head on into other vehicles. This is definitely something the developers overlooked.

What’s more is that the AI is really bad. Wait, let me rephrase that. It’s horrible. Normally in racing games I constantly complain over rubberbanding AI, but that’s remarkably absent here. The issue in Checkered Flag is that the CPU controlled opponents are awful. There’s also no difficulty settings, and so you’re stuck with these cheese brained cars that can barely compete. I was seriously lapping them every race like ten minutes after learning the mechanics. Why the developers didn’t include more difficulty settings is beyond me, or at least fine tune the AI a bit more. Honestly it makes the races super mindless and boring after just a short while.

The gameplay engine also has a lot of issues. Despite being a supposed 64-bit console the hardware sure struggles to run this one. It straight up chugs which is a shame when the comparable 3DO could handle titles like this. The choppy animations make judging turns more difficult than they should be. Controls are also a little slow to respond in general. I found that going in to turns I had to start holding the direction I wanted to go about half a second before I wanted to start turning. It’s not that difficult to overcome but the first few times you wind up wrecked into a wall you’ll be left scratching your head. There are six different camera angles to choose from (each designated to a different key on the numpad) but honestly the most zoomed out one was the only one I liked.

For an Atari Jaguar game Checkered Flag actually looks pretty decent. I’m a big fan of these low polygon games that lack textures, and so this one was right up my alley. The scenery is the high point. Mountains and trees look jagged and unshapely but I’ll be darned if that isn’t part of the appeal here. Now if something could just be done about that framerate. Checkered Flag consistently chugs along at around ten to fifteen frames per second. It doesn’t look pretty in motion, and it actually affects gameplay. Sometimes it’s tough to make turns with any precision when the game isn’t running smoothly. The soundtrack fares a little better but it’s just kind of bleeps and blips. That’s sort of what the Atari Jaguar is known for so I didn’t expect anything different. It sounds decent at least.