Rama is an Indian Comic Book Superhero. Rama is a language spoken in Nicaragua. Rama could refer to one of several kings of Thailand. It’s also a place in Canada (two actually). If you are already familiar with this then you can start playing online casino games in Indonesia that are really popular among players that love card games.
When you take the letter “O” and place it in front of “Rama” and we suddenly have the cheesy suffix “O Rama”. Now take “Cars Race” in front of “O Rama” and you get the barely adequate 2009 video game that was released across several popular gaming systems.
Cars Race-O-Rama, published by THQ, is the third console/handheld game in the Cars series. Tantalus developed the Nintendo DS version, and I want to believe that they tried to make Cars Race-O-Rama more interesting than the other Cars games before it. Unfortunately, it’s not quite as exotic as the Ramas I mentioned at the start of this review. Pretty much the opposite, actually.
After turning on the game, and completing an oddly grueling training session, you’ll come face to face with opposition. You see while Cars hero Lightning McQueen was teaching students in the Doc Hudson Racing Academy, they get ambushed on the race track. McQueen’s arch-nemesis, Chick Hick, arrives and introduces his own school of racers from his own Chick Hicks Racing Academy.
Chick Hicks promises to beat Lightning McQueen and rule over Radiator Springs as Bowser would over the Mushroom Kingdom or Dr. Robotnik would over wherever Sonic and Tails live right now.
The Story mode features Lightning McQueen racing against one of his friends and two generic green Chick Hicks Academy students through various familiar locations. If McQueen races well enough, he then faces off against one of Hicks star pupils: tabloid star Candice, mute mouth Stinger, and macho car El Machismo. Beating those cars opens up more tracks until you finally race against Chick Hicks himself.
As a movie tie-in racing game, it has all of the necessities. It has a Grand Prix story mode, a multiplayer mode (which supports local wireless play), and items that you can buy at the store that will help you open up new areas while you race around.
What is missing is charm, character, humor and anything interesting or memorable.
The storyline is presented in lifeless stills and is dominated by Chick Hicks and his arrogant students. Other Cars’ characters hardly figure into the story at all. The only other car to get any screen time is a reporter named Troy Brakeman (he reports the personalities of each of the rival racers). You do get to see McQueen’s friends when he’s buying auto parts from them, though.
As for Mater, you’ll probably race against him in story mode, and if you stick with the game long enough you’ll open the “Mater’s Tall Tales” bonus modes. (Example: in Tokyo Mater, you control Mater as he drives in a half pipe while avoiding rolling pins and green circles that make him drive slow.)
Graphics are about what I expect for a 2009-era DS game. The music is what I expect from 1987 AM rock station. As for the actual racecourses, they vary a bit but not on a massive scale. Some of the major locations where the races take place are based on areas from the 2006 Pixar film while a few locations are original creations. There are twenty total race tracks but only seven general locations, which means you will revisit locations like “Ornament Valley” and “Metropolis” a couple of times with different detours. Race tracks have names like “All Cars Prepare For Take-Off!” and “Pond Skip, Off The Racing Stripe” that hint at where hidden goodies are located.
Now considering that this is a licensed game I don’t really demand much in the gameplay department so I will say that driving is, uh, manageable. If you ever get the hang of the drifting technique and not slip-sliding off the road while doing so then you might try your hand at the Postcard events. Postcard events exist for every race track, just obtain the impossible to find the camera for the given track you are on your way. The different scenarios are single race, beat the clock, drift challenge (where you drive a lot) or cone challenge (where you knock down cones a lot). Nothing fancy here, the single-race is literally a story mode style race with different characters to race against.
Cars Race-O-Rama for the Nintendo DS is pretty average. Cars Race-O-Rama is kind of dull. Cars Race-O-Rama is one of several movie tie-in cash grabs that don’t add anything new to video gaming. It’s simply a mediocre handheld game (two actually).