While the only Micro Machine toys I remember having were the Star Wars playsets, the Micro Machines video games on the Mega Drive were a big part of my early childhood. The concept was simple yet brilliant: toy cars racing around household settings. I was never good at the games, though, and that has not changed in the years since, as this port of Micro Machines V3 has shown me.

I did find it difficult to get into the controls, which has much more to do with how I haven’t played a racing game of this style for a while, and now I’m used to direction of movement to be based on the camera. This isn’t a fault of the game at all, the controls are very precise and you need to master them to do well at the game.

The tracks are brutal. They start off difficult and then, as you go through the campaign, you unlock more and more sets of tracks of increasing difficulty. You need to mostly stay within the lines, as if you spend too long off the course, you’ll blow up when you get back on it and be sent all the way back to when you were last on it. The game will let you cut some corners, yet others are extremely strict. As you need to learn the courses inside-out to do well at them, you’ll also need to figure out where you can and can’t cut corners.

Micro Machines truly shines in its multiplayer mode, which retains it’s classic formula. It’s not who makes it round the track the fastest. the camera moves with both players, and if enough gap is made to throw a player off the track, the player in front gains a place. Micro Machines 64 Turbo also offers up to eight players, each using a half of an N64 controller (although the controls aren’t as good, due to not using the analogue stick), making it a great multiplayer title for when you have lots of people round.

Fun

Racing through school chemistry equipment (and exiting a bunsen burner as a ball of flame), swerving around a Godzilla-sized sleeping dog, speeding through a garden pond – all these skewed-perspective set pieces haven’t lost their power to entertain.

Jes Bickham, N64 Magazine #25. Review Score: 86%

Remake or Remaster?

A Micro Machines collection is long overdue.

Official Ways to get the game

There’s no official way to play Micro Machines 64 Turbo