A game where you control RC cars through colourful environments, although it’s much more like RC Pro-Am than Micro Machines, as you race around tracks rather than over, under, and around larger-than-life objects. There are a lot of tracks in the game (although one or two in the prototype don’t work), however I found it to be quite difficult, as I’m awful at this style of racing games with the overhead perspective.

One issue with the game is that it doesn’t really do anything special in terms of gameplay. It’s a top down style arcade racer, and that’s about it. It seems like it would have been a decent one, but I don’t think this game would have had much attention if did get released. As for why it was cancelled? Nobody really knows, but Looking Glass Studios didn’t last much longer. This seems like it was almost finished, just a couple of loading issues with some levels.

One thing that Mini Racers did have was a track generator and editor. First, you set parameters such as how many turns, shortcuts, and bumps; but then you can adjust parts of the track manually. The theme of the track seems to be random, though.

There’s also a much earlier prototype game from Looking Glass Studios called Tamiya Racing 64, which is a similar style of game, but that prototype is an endless time trial on a single track. I’m quite confident that it’s an earlier version of Mini Racers, so I don’t think it needs talking about separately.

Fine

Elsewhere, there’s some fairly tight control – including some spot-on physics and a Z-operated turbo boost – and, brilliantly, both a random track generator (as in F-Zero’s X Cup) and a track editor. The multiplayer mode is pretty funtactic too.

N64 Magazine #34

Should it be finished?

It wouldn’t take much to finish it off – just fix the loads for levels and translate the simple menus. However, I’m not sure many people would be interested.