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Microsoft and Sony can have their Forzas and Gran Turismos with hyper-realistic graphics, authentic engine noises, and true-to-life physics. The Nintendo Switch has Cruis’n Blast, in which your vaguely Nissan GT-R-shaped vehicle barrels off a cliff at breakneck speed toward a massive yeti which then cracks open a glacier revealing a hidden jungle paradise beneath the ice.
While its traditionally more powerful rivals use their consoles’ horsepower to accurately render real-world vehicles down to the cigarette lighter in the backseat ashtray, Nintendo’s consoles have played host to some of the most outrageously fun arcade racing games of all time. Remember Beetle Adventure Racing on the Nintendo 64? How about when the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 got the ho-hum Need for Speed: Shift and the Wii got the bright and colorful Need for Speed: Nitro? With less power comes less responsibility, and with less responsibility comes more fun.
When racing game developers like Cruis’n series creator Eugene Jarvis steer away from realism in favor of speed and spectacle, magic happens. Cruis’n Blast, the sixth game in the series that started way back in 1994 with the arcade classic Cruis’n USA, is an outrageously absurd racing game with absolutely no regard for reality. Impossibly shiny cars flip and fly through the air, dropping hundreds of feet while in a flat spin, landing completely unscathed. Tracks shatter into pieces mid-race, revealing completely different terrain somehow buried beneath the Earth’s crust. Sometimes there are dinosaurs.
In Cruis’n Blast a fire truck can outrace a Corvette Stingray. A classic 1959 Corvette can keep pace with a Nissan 370Z. It’s a wonder how the developers got licenses for some of the game’s two dozen or so vehicles, given how little what they are affects how they perform in the game. I’m just as happy racing generic vehicles like the police cruiser, fire truck, or death-defying superbike as I am cartoony versions of real Nissans, Chevys, and Cadillacs.
Read the full article on Kotaku
