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Game Sequels That Need to Happen: Uniracers 2

February 23rd, 2007 by Mike

Uniracers was a game Nintendo came out with for SNES way back in 1994. Perhaps game isn’t the right word. Let’s try underrated masterpiece. The basic concept is that you’re a unicycle that rides around on crazy loopy, twisty, sometimes goopy race tracks. As a unicycle, you are prone to enjoying tricks, and this is where the game kicks into gear. It has the speed and crazy movement of a Sonic game and the intuitive point and style-based trick system of a Tony Hawk game. Thing is, this game came before Tony Hawk. A little ahead of it’s time? Indeed. Read on for the breakdown.

The aforementioned features alone would make for a great game, but Nintendo decided to throw in some personality to boot. Your uniracers are alive, they aren’t just your typical rusty clown-ridden one-wheelers. The seats are their heads and the seats tilt and track the other players, looking behind them if you’re ahead or looking above or below you if there’s somebody, well, above or below you. There’s some very smooth and simple physics, which come through not only in the air you catch of a jump or the speed you gain going downhill, but the uniracer itself squashes and bounces appropriately. UNIRACERS was just one of those games that felt right.

So how would it feel on the DS?

CONTROL

As the DS’s face buttons are pretty much the same as those of the SNES, you could maintain the same basic control scheme:

Hold X: Z Flip
A Button OR tap D-Pad L then D-Pad R: Twist
L button: Flip
R button: Roll
Tap X 2x: Tabletop
Stop, jump, hold X: Head Bounce

There are of course more moves than this, but these are the basics. They can be correctly timed to string together for combos for even bigger point scores, and the better the trick, the more boost you get after you land it (if you land it).

So that takes care of the face buttons, but how would it use the DS’s other functions?

NOT SO LONELY ANYMORE

This is where the true sequel aspect of the game starts coming in. The original game only featured 2-player multiplayer. Let’s just say UNIRACERS 2 kicks it up to 8 with online functionality. Sweet, no? If you happened to not be paying attention, that would be a yes.

Not only would the 8 players be allowed to challenge eachother in ranked race modes or stunt modes, but there’d be an entirely new mode:

DESIGNER MODE

The most visible aspect or signature of the original UNIRACERS wasn’t the design of the uniracers themselves, it was the insane, colorful, loopy, twisty tracks. There seems to me to be obvious potential here to use the touchscreen to design your own tracks and trade and race them online. Kinda cool, right. But let’s kick it up a notch, what if you had a designated designer design the tracks while you were racing on them?

Two teams would play in this game (hot colors vs. cool colors, where one team picks uniracer colors from hot colors and the other cool colors), with up to 4 on each. One player on each team would randomly be chosen to be the designer (unless he opts out of the duty in his preferences). The goal is to design a track that gets your teams 3 racers the most points. Finishing at a higher placing will give a small boost to your score, and the races will be timed, but the meat of the mode is getting bonus tokens and setting up sweet lines to trick off of. Think of it as a competitive Kirby: Canvus Curse, where one person designs and three people control their racers on top of that line.

The line never breaks, so you can’t intentionally kill your racers. Anybody who abuses their designing duty can be kicked off the server and all that, but you’d just have to try to hook up with some reliable teammates.

Not only can you design the tracks, drawing moguls, huge rises and falls, jumps and loops but you can try to guide your racers towards powerups that will let you have limited amounts of special tracks to draw. If you get them over to a Tornado icon, you get Twisty Tracks, which lets your players spin around the track like a barrell roll to add to their trick combo, and also acts as a boost. If you hit the Water icon, you get a limited amount of slippery track to draw, which gives your team a huge speed boost if they go over it, but they won’t be able to land any tricks on it, and if it’s on an uphill segment, they’ll have trouble getting up the hill.

When they hit the icon on their screen (you have a map on your top screen that shows their location) the icons will show up on the top-left of your touch screen to tap so you can use them. If they trick into the icon, they get a 2X multiplier. The third icon in the pic sets the track style back to default.

CUSTOMIZATION OPTIONS

Before each match you can pick the color theme of your default track, as well as setup a teamname and a voice taunt (which can be activated three times a match per team by hitting select). Players can also choose to have their username displayed above their uniracer, and choose from a menu of possible taunt animations that your uniracer will perform at the victory screen should you win. Winners show up on the top screen with their stats displayed, the losers show up on the bottom screen, where the winners can use the stylus to throw old cans and boots at their uniracers.

CONCLUSION

So there you have it, UNIRACERS 2, a game that would have you turning more tricks than an LA hooker. Though the likelihood of a sequel ever being made is ultra-slim, the original did show up on the very first leaked list of Nintendo’s games they plan to have available on the Wii’s Virtual Console (when it was still known as the “Revolution Download Service”). As much as I would love for this to be a DS game, as the gameplay would be perfect in short bursts, it could also double as a great Wii game. Perhaps a release of the sequel as a 1000 point or so Virtual Console download would be in order. Keep those fingers crossed.

Entry Filed under: Gaming