The graphics engine in Disney/Pixar's Toy Story Racer (hereafter called Toy Story Racer -- that company name bit is just annoying) is quite solid. There are only a few places in the game that I noticed some pop-up, and that was only in extremely long rooms or in two-player mode. Even then, the pop-up was so far away as to be irrelevant -- the course in front of you is always fully visible. The game is also full of reflective surfaces, which is something that I haven't seen much on the aging PSX. I never saw the framerate drop during the single-player game, and while it occasionally stutters a bit in two-player mode, it's never so much as to be frustrating.

The courses themselves are varied and often quite huge. You'll find yourself racing through a number of different environments, from houses to backyards to Pizza Planet, and each looks quite nice.

The special effects in the game are simplistic, but they get the job done. You can always tell what weapons you have, and the way that the racers are painted 'black' whenever they've been knocked out of the race is a nice touch. The models themselves are a little small and simplistic, reminding me more of Muppet Race Mania than, say, Crash Team Racing, but each character is pretty easily identifiable.

The sound effects are the same generic ones that you've been hearing in kart racers for ages -- explosions, bounces, rockets, and whatnot. There's nothing really special there. However, the voice acting is excellent. This could be because the actual voice actors from the movie are used. There's not as much voice acting as I would have liked (only a few quips per character), but what's there is solid. The music isn't as solid as the voice acting, unfortunately, as it's not done by Randy Newman but instead by studio musicians. It's certainly not bad, and indeed there are a few devilishly memorable tunes, but with Traveller's Tales going as far as they went to keep the Toy Story ambiance, it would have been nice to have the music as well.

All right. Do you think that Toy Story Racer does anything really inventive or amazing for the overfull kart racing genre? If you said no, you'd be correct. 'But then', you must ask, 'is it worth my time?' To which I must say: yes. While it really doesn't do anything you haven't seen before, Toy Story Racer has more things to do in it than any kart racer I've ever seen, and it will be weeks before you unlock everything there is to do.

As is usual with games of this sort, there's no real backstory or explanation. The various toys from the Toy Story world are going to compete against each other, for no real discernible reason other than that the environments are there. At the beginning, you're given a choice of four of the eventual ten racers, and away you go.

The first thing you'll notice is the game structure. Every racer has a large number of challenges to complete, all hovering around 20 each. However, each challenge has a different requirement to unlock it, in the form of army men. For every challenge you complete, you gain an army man, and all of the higher challenges require increasing numbers of the little green dudes to open.

After over an hour of completing these challenges, you'll finally start to unlock new characters. You'll keep unlocking characters until right before you beat the entire game -- they're scattered about in most of the racers' challenge stacks. It's definitely an incentive to keep doing the challenges, as you'll want to have all the racers to play in multiplayer mode.

The actual challenges vary quite a bit, and I was still seeing new types of challenges five hours into the game. They range from the expected -- straight-out racing, and reverse racing as well -- to the slightly less common -- battle arenas, and championship cups to go along with those -- to the unique, such as the races that you have to destroy every opponent and come in under the time limit to win. Those are an absolute bear. The 'destroy the targets' ones can also be frustrating.

An important thing to remember, though, is that you usually have a relatively large choice of challenges to do. At any given time you may have four to ten ready for you to complete, so if you're stuck on one, you have the ability to go and do something else for a while.

The single-player game is huge, and I doubt very many people will complete it all the way -- it's almost overwhelming in scope. Indeed, it's one of those games that you can pick up and play for twenty minutes or three hours, as you get a sense of progression either way. This is perhaps the best use of a 'carrot' in kart racers that I've ever seen, competing only with Crash Team Racing in terms of sheer 'things to do'.

The multiplayer game is fun, but it's only two players at once on splitscreen. There are a lot of different challenges, and quite a few of the races are very entertaining, but there are better multiplayer kart racing games out there, such as the aformentioned CTR and Speed Punks. Don't get me wrong: playing against a friend in multiplayer Toy Story Racer is quite fun, and you may well spend a few hours doing it. But it just doesn't have the staying power of other games in the genre, and it doesn't have the four-player support that makes others so enjoyable.

The AI in Toy Story Racer is surprisingly robust, and I found myself getting stuffed in quite a few of the races before I figured out the shortcuts and learned how and where to tighten my racing line. Even then, it seems that the computer always drives a little faster, a little harder, and a little more accurately than you. It does use the same paths over and over, though, which can be used to your advantage, especially in the annoying Tag Challenges. There are some genuinely difficult challenges, such as the Super Elimination races (or whatever they're called), where you have to destroy all your opponents and win, and the ones with the targets can be difficult as the game has issues detecting hits. But none of the races are impossibly challenging, and although a few races took me more than ten tries to get through, I ended up getting through them all.

The controls in Toy Story Racer are straight from the original Super Mario Kart, with little to no change. There's no powersliding, so you'll have to rely on your own ability to do tight turns to stay ahead in the race. There are speed boosts, which can both help you and hurt you -- control during them is well-nigh impossible. The core engine is very solid, and I only had one occasion where I had to exit a race because of a bug -- I got stuck bouncing on a vehicle, unable to get off of the damned thing because of the angle at which I entered the bounce. Ugh. Other than that, though, the game plays fine. Some weapons are definitely more useful than others [the antenna zap is my favourite, mainly because I don't have to aim it], but each has its use, and the realistic physics used for the Magic 8 Ball is very impressive for a game of this type.

PS2: Don't expect any graphical improvements when you use the Smoothing graphics option on your PS2 -- the game is already rendering very solidly, and the difference between the 'improved' mode and the original is negligible. In fact, you'll notice some graphical errors, such as with the drawing order of powerups, when you play it in that mode. The Fast disc option works, and it does speed up the load times in the game, but that's a matter of going from 'near instantaneous' to 'instantaneous'. It's certainly noticeable, but the loads weren't frustrating in the first place.