# - C D - I J - N O - S T - Z
 
Genre: 3D / Racing / Adventure CDs: 1 (469 Megs) Players: 1 to 2 Players ESRB: Teen
Animated Violence
Publisher: Electronic Arts Retail Barcode: 0 14633 14251 8 Memory: 1 Block
Developer: Eutechnyx Sony ID: SLUS-01300 Accessories: Analog Control, Vibration
Released: November 1, 2000 PSRM: 021120


Box Copy
Pay attention 007, this is for your eyes only. Q-Branch has re-engineered some of your favorite automobiles with additional gadgets and firepower. You'll need everything they've got, plus your own uncanny ability to beat the odds. The free world is depending on you. Oh, one other thing before you go 007- try to bring them back in one piece.

Discussion
Here is a game whose ideas are far greater than the sum of the parts. In fact, the concept alone should have inspired the developers in the opposite direction they chose.

Let’s go over the general idea of the game: you play as Pierce Brosnan’s Bond character and use several modern day and vintage Bond cars through different missions with various objectives. Sounds amazing, doesn’t it? Well it would be, if not for several key factors.

Factor 1: The game is insanely too hard.

When this game demands it, even on the easy setting, it is nerve-splitting difficult. When presented with the third stage you are forced to fend off forklifts that are better armored than a Bond car, and then attempt to grab an amazingly bad EMP weapon to destroy 10 computer terminals in about 2 minutes. The problems here includes EA not understanding what an EMP is, and that if you wanted to destroy the computer terminals, you’re sitting in a freaking BMW with machine guns, rockets, and Hell Fire missiles.

The warehouse stage has you controlling a Bond car via remote play…except you’re using forced security camera angles that change and phase out at random. All while trying to find boxes with green circles on them through a completely green point-of-view.

Another stage has you attempting to disable the engines of a jet liner. Now, in normal thinking, this would mean ramming your unarmed car into the engines at full speed to knock them off the jet and prevent the plane from taking off. Not so; you need to gently tap them with the car repeatedly to disable them. After that you have to knock out the oncoming debris without knowing your rockets and car now work. You have all of like 5 seconds to do it.

Factor 2: Half the game is played wrong.

We’ll start with the 2nd to last stage to explain this. You are given the BMW from Tomorrow Never Dies, and there’s a Q spoken run-down of the entire armament; except, after all that you don’t get to use it. You just have to drive close to cars; if you screw up, the needed car leaps to another spot, with no extra time on the clock.

The worst offender though, is the underwater Bond car. Despite showing the movie clips of it in action underwater, you’re not allowed the privilege. The car simply comes out of the water during an intro and you must drive it around an underwater base.

After all this frustration, which doesn’t count attempting the higher difficulty, all you really unlock are color changing features. I can have red water! I can have

All of that is then rolled into a very poor control scheme and a physics engine that doesn’t grasp the concept that a car weighs more than 3 pounds. Many stages that involved bumps or slight raised areas will cause your car to do a cartwheel for no reason. About the only saving grace are the audio clips of R and Q yelling at you every so often during the game, but with all the glitches and continues you burn through even those get old very quickly.

In the end, 007 Racing had the potential to be a fan boy’s dream ride. Instead, we are presented with abysmal controller throwing excursion. Play only if you must.		 Trivia
  • Variant, see below.
     
  • John Cleese reprises his role as gadget man R from the movie series.
     
  • John Cleese is the only actor to offer his real voice to the in-game character. Despite images, all other characters are done by other people. Some of them rather poorly.
     
  • Among the featured cars are the Aston Martin, the BMW Z, and the Lotus. Most of the cars have their gadgets intact, or have an explanation for them not being used (as per the lack of underwater stages).
     
  • The only game in the EA Action Collector's Edition not released as a Greatest Hits.
     
  • Not including the 'good guys', there is only one real James Bond bad guy in the entire game, and that's Jaws.
     
  • This game was only available on PlayStation.
     
  • Carson Pascoe, who voices Dr. Melody Chase in this game, has voiced other characters in other James Bond games, including Christmas Jones.
     
  • There is an interesting glitch in the stage where you must rescue the agent from a bunker. Even if the character doesn't get into the car, the timer to end the stage begins. The only way to combat the issue is to enter the bunker from an angle, hope the character gets in right away, and then haul ass in the opposite angle you entered.
     
  • During the boat chase sequence, there is a radio broadcast picked up from the local police force. The two voices sound amusingly like parodies of Boss Hogg and Roscoe P. Coltrane from The Dukes of Hazzard.
     
  • The PSone symbols on the License Plate on the cover car don't mean anything.
     
  • For all the difficulty the game throws at you, it has a severely warped sense of humor with unlocking secrets. The majority are just weird color changing functions that add no real reason to replay the game.
Variants / Misprints
Released along side 007 Tomorrow Never Dies and Medal of Honor inside the EA Collectors' Edition 'Action' Pack.

007 Racing - Collectors' Edition Variant - SLUS-01300 / PSRM-021124
Ads
This two page ad for the game features some interesting problems, 2 of which we'll discuss here.

1. The ad clearly shows it's for the PlayStation 2 as well, and since it didn't come out for PS2, we know that didn't bode too well for the success of the PlayStation version.

2.  Though you can't see it here, the screenshots are horribly faked. They are obviously not the PSX version, and they are two hap-hazard to be PS2 screenshots. If anything, they were either simple mock-ups for what they wanted to do, or EA was trying way too hard to bluff their way into revealing how little the game was in development. This wouldn't have been the first time EA faked a screenshot or two...

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