Oh, my poor Hot Wheels . You never did anything to deserve this kind of treatment, did you? Sure, you look good, and it's neat to see you transforming, but let's face it: Playing with Hot Wheels has always been about imagined driving. Nothing about Hot Wheels Extreme Racing lives up to what I imagined when I played with these things. The most redeeming thing for Hot Wheels fans are neat looking vehicles driving, flying and boating, not to mention transforming between states. It's a cool effect to watch the cars grow wings and take off. The game slows to a crawl while this happens, but it's still cool. And, the different choices for what vehicle you'll drive are okay, but I don't quite get the similarity between all the cars. I mean, this is Hot Wheels . The company that modeled about every vehicle known to man. This should be like Gran Turismo meets Motor Toon meets R/C Revenge , but it comes off like some generic, stiff racing game. The Hot Wheels license would suggest fast cars in a small package, and I wanted to see crazy, cool interesting vehicles. Instead, the tracks steal the show. They're way more interesting than the cars, and you'll have lots of opportunities to check out the track when you're skidding and bouncing all over it. But really, with a solid engine and some cooler vehicles, these would have been nice tracks to race on. They fall short on size, and there's a bit of deceptive advertising in the claim of 24 tracks. There are 12 single-player and 12 multiplayer tracks, but the difference is mostly cosmetic. So, catchy visuals or not, we're given little to sink our eyes into. Or our ears, for that matter. The music seriously lacks staying power, and you'll be dialing it down after the second or third track, guaranteed. It's just bouncy, pointless nonsense, the kind of tunes you'd expect in a 30-second commercial. Which is great for the commercial, but what happens when you try to sit and play for an hour or so? That's a lot of 30-second spots, man...

The racing motto for Hot Wheels Extreme Racing is, 'RACE with what's under the hood, but WIN with what's strapped on top!' This translates to a style of racing gameplay we all know well by now. You enter a Championship with one of the vehicles and choose some custom options. First sign that this is aimed at a younger set seems to be that you're given a set of sprockets that when added to your vehicle will greatly change things like handling, acceleration and speed. As you win, you'll earn more sprockets, but it's safe to say that the cars available at first can be modified to race exactly the same with the sprockets you have on hand. Basically, you cycle through the parts available to put on the car, and choose the parts you want upgraded. It's not a matter of earning the actual parts, as in some racing games. Here, the expectation is that you'll use all the parts in transforming from state to state, so the question is how to apply your sprockets to upgrade parts that you really want jacked up. As an example, you can simply change a car with weak stats to a contender by modifying all the parts that it is weak in. Poor speed and acceleration? Tune up the engine. Now, be sure to tune each engine you'll use in the upcoming race. The unique nature of these transforming Hot Wheels cars means that if you're turning into a plane and a boat from a car and want to upgrade your engine, you'll upgrade engine, prop and jet. These will boost performance no matter what state you're in. Or, if you feel like handling is important on the water, but you want more power on land you can tune the car to your desired specs.

It all sounds wonderful, but the biggest catch is that Hot Wheels plays like garbage. Cars go skidding around on the track, and you have to basically mod the car to death before it even feels like anything close to driving. If the philosophy was to make cars loose and floaty at first and require gamers to make them drivable by adding parts, we have a winner. But, we also have a loser, since most racing fans (especially younger ones) will make their assessment in the first 10 minutes and decide it's time to move on to something else. Even with difficulty settings dialed down, nothing about this feels polished. The weapons available during the races just feel useless, since nobody has to shoot a bomb at you or throw a banana peel in your path to make your car veer uncontrollably around the track. Sure, some cars are better than others, but in this case that's like saying some cigarettes taste better than others. The idea of racing on different surfaces in the same environment is a nice one, but the game just doesn't play that well. The Championship is over before you know it, and if you don't bother with Arcade or Time Trial Mode, there's Multiplayer, which suffers in split-screen mode from the abominable slowdown present even in the 1-Player mode. Basically, there are 5 or 6 other games I'd recommend before this one, even for a rental. Even slathering Hot Wheels fans will probably wonder what they did to be punished so severely by the gods after a few minutes behind the wheel.

Yes, it's difficult trying to control a vehicle apparently based on the physics model of a greased pig. Every time I felt like I was gaining some control over my car, it would just slip out from under me. And I'm not talking about wacky, kart-racing antics. I'm talking about, 'Oh God, why hast thou forsaken me' type of action. The type of feeling when you're driving easily down a straight path, braking for a corner, only to find yourself scraping against the wall, driving the wrong direction and understanding finally that the corner needs to be taken at less than 10mph to be cleared successfully. Losing at the last minute because of some superweapon that the guy behind you pulled, even though you've been in the lead since the first lap? Sure, that's difficult. I'd say beyond all the glitches, the most difficult thing is trying to play through even one racetrack in Hot Wheels Extreme Racing without crying for mercy and wondering why you don't save receipts after buying games.

The irony of a game with transforming cars that look cool but move like tigers on Vaseline (thanks Bowie... ;) isn't lost on me. It's the curse of the license game, really. They actually did come up with one of the things that makes Hot Wheels fun to play with, which is the variety of the cars. Even when they didn't transform, it was fun to play with different ones, imagine them racing, and set up little Hot Wheels derby events. So, the appeal isn't lost on me. Where I get lost is how a franchise or license based entirely on realistic models of cars and the idea of little machines for kids with big imaginations got trumped by something as innocuous as R/C Revenge or RC de Go. Because, those games have more honest racing excitement in one lap than Hot Wheels can muster for the entire game. Say all you will about adding features and 'tweaking' the car, but if it can't race well out of the box, why should we bother? We'll make excuses for genres that aren't full, but racing on PSone? No problem making a Top 10 list there. And, racing has no target age. I collected Hot Wheels, and I'd be just as likely to race my 9-year old neighbor as I would be to play against a 20-something friend. So, what standard was this held up to? The engine fails on so many levels, but the slowdown apparent when you use weapons makes it not worth your time to use them. Enemies will rush you like crazy if you don't get into the combat action, but it's hard enough to control the damn cars, much less try and aim weapons or think about picking some special weapon. Mostly, I just looked for turbo boost, so I could get ahead of the pack and compensate for the weird crashes I knew would happen eventually.

Blame me, if you want. I'm just a guy who loves racing games. There's almost nothing I won't forgive a game if the action is good and the cars control well. I don't need fancy graphics. RC de Go had almost cartoonish graphics, but it was fun to play. Some of the prettier games, like Square's game-that-must-not-be-named for PS2, just don't work because of poor controls. If you love Hot Wheels , the time has still not come for your imagination to be translated to the gaming world. Leave it to the LEGO people to do things right. Their racing game may be aimed at a young set, but at least they got the racing part right.