The Atari Jaguar has a bad reputation for much of its library consisting of rushed and half baked software. Games like Club Drive are the reason for this. It’s infamously bad, and the critics weren’t far off. If anything they were too easy on this one. So how does one of the premiere first party games for the Atari Jaguar fare? We’re here today to talk about this, and more. Strap yourself in because this review is going to be a little painful.
Believe it or not Atari shoehorned a story into Club Drive. It’s as bad as you might suspect. The setting for this game is an amusement park which is one of the last places where driving hasn’t been outlawed. Yes, in the year 2098 (when Club Drive takes place) driving cars is illegal because of safety concerns. You play as someone partaking in racing events on the island. The thing is there’s apparently no one else here because the only other car you’ll spot is the second player (if you can find a friend who wants to play this travesty, that is.) It’s very telling that this is the drivel Atari was able to come up with in terms of story. It’s just unnecessary.
Now we get to the good stuff. Gameplay. Or not. It’s whatever. I’ll start with the good points. First of all the game is fully 3D which for the Atari Jaguar that’s pretty impressive. It’s even free roaming, and the terrain isn’t flat. There are hills, dips, mountains etc. The Golden Gate Bridge is even rendered with surprising competence in one of the stages. It’s also pretty impressive that Club Drive has multiple gameplay styles, and multiplayer with one friend to boot. Now we get to the bad stuff, and that will take up the rest of this review.
First of all Club Drive feels unfinished even by demo standards. We’ll start with the racing mode. There are no other cars here except yourself, and you compete only to beat your best times. That’s pretty rough, but the kiss of death is in that these courses are empty. There are few moving parts or even obstacles. It’s a simple drive from point A to point B, but there’s almost nothing to get in your way. You aren’t even penalized for poor performance and have unlimited time to reach the end. As I mentioned earlier you’re competing only to beat your best times. Time trials are throwaway game modes in just about every racer, and when it’s one of the main modes of play you know you’re in for a real snoozefest.
The next gameplay mode isn’t great nor is it inventive. It’s weird. Here you drive around each course searching for and collecting special orbs. I’ve never enjoyed games based on collecting hidden items and it’s all the more painful here. These are pretty easy to find but it’s a real labor to search the nooks and crannies in such poorly designed stages for them. It’s a work of labor, and again you’re just competing to beat your best times. What this mode (and the other one for that matter) needed was AI opponents to compete against. As it stands Club Drive just feels empty and devoid of most of what makes a video game… well… a game.
Finally we have tag where you have to touch your opponent. This is actually the best of the game modes because you’re competing for something more than just driving from one point to another. It’s also reserved for multiplayer, and I have to admit that the bad collision detection and physics caused me to laugh a lot here. If you have a friend willing to undergo the torture then this is the best way to play. As a matter of fact the only way I recommend even trying out Club Drive is with a friend, and in this mode where you’re chasing each other down. It’s good for a few laughs.
Now we get to the stages themselves. Thematically Club Drive is kind of a mess. I suppose it’s based off of California which as someone who has lived here most of my life I can appreciate. On the other hand the developers came up with some really weird ideas. You can drive through the city of San Francisco which is neat but the whole area is too confusing to be fun. This is the only place I struggled to actually find the finish line at. Then we have a course called ‘Jerome’s Place’ and believe you me this guy and his pad are pretty quirky. Why do we need to drive around a guy’s house as a miniaturized car? It makes little sense. There’s also an Old West style stage that just feels out of place.
My next issue is with the physics engine itself. Given how absolutely primitive the graphics engine is I didn’t have much hope but this is the area wherein Club Drive feels most half baked. There are hills and jumps in the game which sound impressive, but you have to hit them just right or else your car will clip and you’ll end up in an alligator style death roll. Getting flipped around like you’re in a tornado just because you didn’t hit the ramp head on is laughable. Crash into anything and you can’t be sure if you’ll ever get all four wheels back on to the ground. With such a primitive engine you would assume they would focus on and fine tune the physics but I suppose the developers just didn’t care. On the plus side it does make the Tag mode more hilarious.
And then there’s the graphics. The Atari Jaguar was no polygonal powerhouse, and the open natured of the stages takes a real toll on the processing power of this console. As such everything is rendered with just a few polygons, and it’s all flat shaded. There are no textures to speak of. You’re driving around a world of blocks and clay, and it looks laughably bad. The worst moment is in Jerome’s Place when you encounter a cat. It’s a block with two legs, a head, and a tail. It looks like something I could make with legos in thirty seconds. The framerate is also very poor and makes timing for turns and what not nearly impossible. The soundtrack sounds like something you would find in an early Sega Genesis game with an incompetent composer. It’s all bad.
