SPOGS Racing - WiiWare review

You remember POGs, right? They were those little collectable cap things that were hugely popular for 15 minutes at some point during the 1990s. We seem to remember them turning up in our breakfast cereal boxes occasionally. So clearly there’s never been a better time to reinvent these POGs by sticking them in a single wheel and then building a racer around the whole concept. Clearly. Actually, we wish we’d kept hold of some proper POGs because they’d serve rather well as eye patches, and then we wouldn’t have had to witness this, the most insipid racing game since ‘My Little Pony: Derby Days’.

Once you’ve created your bespoke SPOG – and by that we mean choosing a picture for the disc, your name and a stats bias – then there are two main game modes to ‘enjoy’. The straight racing is a delight of bland, uninspiring tracks where there’s no sense of speed or even being attached to the track. It’s no more fun in multiplayer mode than it is solo, but you can compete across a full season if you want. To be fair, there’s a little more entertainment to be squeezed from the Crash & Grab mode. Here you wheel your way along the same dreary tracks at the same pedestrian pace, but when you bash into a fellow racer you get to pinch some of their stats (brakes, tires, exhaust and so on) which are then added to your own ride.

It’s one of those games that almost defy comment. A game that boasts of dramatic stunts that actually turn out to be the camera cutting away to show that you’re jumping a gap. Rubbish and pointless. Easily the poorest WiiWare game so far, a racer based on a nonsensical premise. There’s more fun to be had in reading instruction manuals for toasters.

Aug 8, 2008