Retro spotlight: Beetle Adventure Racing!
The racing game where every car is a Volkswagen Beetle, because that's what 1999 was like.
This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
One of the fun things about the Nintendo 64 is that, because there were so many Playstation games, sometimes releasing a title on the competitor console with a smaller install base made more sense. Something like Beetle Adventure Racing! maybe wouldn’t have stood out on the Playstation, where over 1,300 games would release in North America alone, nearly twice as many for the region as the previous generation’s leader, the Super Nintendo. On the Nintendo 64, though, where the combined library of games across Japan, North America, and Europe totaled around 400? A game with a strange premise backed by the right publisher could stand out.
The publisher? Electronic Arts, which was more experimental then than they are now, but still large with loads of reach in the late-90s, to the point that they felt they could demand sports exclusivity on the Dreamcast (which they did not get). The premise? Beetle Adventure Racing isn’t a game about racing bugs, which would have certainly qualified as weird, but what it actually is manages to be just about as strange. Every car that you can race in this game is a Volkwagen Beetle. That is not a car known for its speed or its handling — it’s an economy car! — but its recognizable shape and design. In 1998, Volkswagen introduced the “New Beetle,” reviving the car that had first been designed in Germany in the late-1930s for the first time in over 20 years, when it was replaced by the Golf in 1974.
I’m pretty sure I don’t need to remind you about what was going on in Germany in the late-30s or what Volkswagen was up to at that time, but just in case: Volkswagen was formed in Germany specifically to create a fuel-efficient and affordable “people’s car” that could transport entire German families, because that’s what Adolf Hitler demanded. His obsession with technology and automobiles was one he wanted to extend to the entire country to display strength and superiority, at a time when only luxury vehicles were being made by German auto manufacturers and cars were not owned by many Germans. Of course, since this was literally Nazi Germany, “extend to the entire country” meant “except for the German Jews,” who were banned from driving in Germany in 1938. No, the relationship German Jews had with automobiles in Germany wasn’t on the road, but in forced labor camps operated by Volkswagen, of which there were four according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Now, the Beetle was designed before World War II began, but it didn’t actually go into production until around a decade later, since the Third Reich stopped the production of civilian vehicles and instead used those factories to build up the Nazi war machine. I don’t note this to suggest that you should feel all warm and fuzzy about the Beetle or Volkswagen’s post-war status, especially given that this is a company which, decades after its time building machines of genocidal death and utilizing forced labor, purposefully built in ways for its diesel-burning cars’ to cheat emission tests so they could be sold in the United States and then destroyed evidence of the fraud when it was clear they were caught. But so that you at least have an understanding of the timeline and history at play here. The Beetle is cute, sure: Volkswagen kind of needs it to be seen as such considering everything else.
It sure is something to have the worse historical evil in a partnership involving EA not be them, huh? Anyway, in Beetle Adventure Racing, as said, every car is a beetle. This was due to the deal EA signed with Volkswagen to promote 1998’s New Beetle, and this ended up being the replacement for a planned N64-exclusive version of Need for Speed, which was supposed to be developed by Paradigm Entertainment, of which there were few developers out there that knew more about how the N64 worked. Paradigm had worked with Nintendo on their behind-closed-doors demo of Nintendo 64 technology at E3 in 1995, and co-developed Pilotwings 64 with them, too. They ended up with a pretty impressive list of N64 titles in the end: along with Pilotwings 64, Paradigm also developed Aero Fighters Assault, F-1 World Grand Prix, Duck Dodgers Starring Daffy Duck, the Europe-only F-1 World Grand Prix II, and Indy Racing 2000 on the system.
Beetle Adventure Racing was Paradigm, too, as they simply shifted from the Need for Speed assignment to this one at EA’s order. Admittedly, reviews for Indy Racing 2000 were mediocre, and Aero Fighters Assault takes a certain kind of person to be into, but all told that’s an impressive run on one console for a developer that hadn’t focused exclusively on video games until Pilotwings 64 in the first place.
Back to the cars! The various Beetles have different colors and decals and paint jobs, and you can choose whichever you want for the car you’re driving, but the cars with better specs need to be unlocked. Everything that you begin with on Easy is slow, accelerates poorly, and doesn’t handle particularly well, and the game feels real slow for it. Again, these aren’t race cars, they’re Beetles. But by the time you unlock the toughest difficulty and its cars, you’ll start to get Beetles that can go 130 miles per hour in fifth gear and took practice to handle just right as you attempt to speed around corners and race in cars that were very much not designed for either of those purposes.
Since a Beetle is only going to go so fast, the emphasis in Beetle Adventure Racing is on exploration and shortcuts. Courses are lengthy, especially when you’re topping out at 100 mph on the lower difficulty levels, so the fun bits that keep you engaged are in finding the hidden entrances to various shortcuts, or learning that there is a cost to attempting to acquire the bonus point boxes that help you earn continues in the championship mode, lest you be eliminated for not having enough points to continue on. That cost comes in a couple of ways: for one, not every alternative path is actually a shortcut, as some will take you longer to traverse than the standard road you’re supposed to be on, and sometimes you’re going so fast that these little side routes are treacherous and full of car crashes if you’re also attempting to swerve around collecting these boxes full of bonus points.
So, you need to learn through practice which routes are ones you only want to be taking the one time in order to grab the bonus points and then, on future laps, take the faster way — the fact the “Nitro” boxes that speed you up are one-time use and won’t be located in these shortcuts the second time around is motivation enough to not return — and which ones you need to definitely drop your gear for if you don’t want to ricochet off of the walls. Your Beetle can take a beating, but eventually, it’ll blow up if you go overboard with crashing or straight-up fall into, say, a volcano. Oh, right. This is also the kind of racing game where you need to slow down considerably to navigate the interior of a volcano. But not too slow, or you’ll be passed by someone braver, or at least less risk-averse, than you. Learning when to use the standard brake for less severe deceleration and when to use the handbrake for more violent slowing down that’ll help you drift around corners is vital to navigating these more treacherous stretches.
As for those bonus points and the continues they earn you, the number of points necessary changes with the difficulty. You might need just 50 of the 100 scattered points for a continue on the easiest difficulty, but 60 or more on the tougher ones. Thy come in increments of two, five, and 10, and while some will be right there on the side of the road, easily collected by crashing into the boxes holding them, the vast majority are hidden away behind secret paths, or off of optional ramps that allow you to jump over water or parts of the track. You aren’t going to learn the location of all of them in one or two or three and so on attempts at a course, in part because there are so many of the things to grab, but also because you’re busy racing and focusing on finishing ahead of the other cars. You can try and try to get to a point where you can collect all 100 points and earn the bonus from doing so — said bonus is an unlocked Beetle Battle arena for multiplayer — but finishing first in the same race you’re doing that in might be tough to pull off, given the aforementioned note about how not every “shortcut” is actually faster.
There’s another hidden goodie to find, and those are flower boxes. The game doesn’t even tell you they exist, but that’s because they’re exceptionally optional collectibles: picking up the hidden flower boxes unlocks cheats. There are a few of these per course, 18 in total, and they aren’t hidden in places that are conducive to winning your race, either. Take, for example, this explanation from a guide dedicated specifically to the flower boxes for a basic understanding of how you have to go off of the beaten path to find them:
Easy enough, although it was the product of the CPU's reckless driving. Right after jumping the bridge, slam on the _regular_ brakes. (The reason I say "_regular_ brakes" is that the handbrake will stop you too soon.) You should stop a little way after the crane. Turn around, and go into a gap in the fence behind the crane. There it is, just sitting there.
Going off the road, turning around, and squeezing through an out-of-the-way fence just to find it? Then having to find your way back to the road, too? Once you get it and complete the course, you’re good, but yeah, you won’t be unlocking these in races you’re also finishing in first place, not unless you race on Easy while using the fastest cars available after you’ve unlocked the higher difficulties.
Speaking of those, there are a few to unlock: you begin “championship mode” on easy with the slowest cars, but successfully getting through that three-course race unlocks the standard difficulty, which increases the race count to four and introduces faster, better-handling Beetles along with the improved opponents. Complete that, and you get the five-course professional difficulty and its new cars, and then, there’s the bonus circuit, which you won’t get until after you’ve completed professional. As if the whole Volkswagen thing wasn’t fraught enough as is, one of the bonus cars is a police car, and it’s of course the best one in the entire game that you should probably always be using from that point forward. It’s great in part because it lets you basically cheat: when you use the police car’s horn, a siren goes off, and the other cars slow down and stop. Fitting, at least.
The soundtrack is fun, with horns and a lot of bass-heavy funk happening in the various songs, but there is one complaint I have, which is that sometimes it sounds like it’s just kind of dropping out. This is especially a problem on Mount Mayhem — the levels between the announcer, car sounds, and music don’t seem to be balanced like they should. It’s a minor complaint in the grand scheme of things, but a shame given the quality of the soundtrack, and takes focus away from an otherwise cohesive product whenever it happens.
Beetle Adventure Racing supports up to four players in its multiplayer battle mode, in which the goal is to collect ladybugs, destroy the other races, and reach the course’s exit safely after doing those things. Two-player races are the norm for multiplayer, otherwise, but you have to have unlocked the additional three courses in order to play on them, and the same goes for the various other vehicles. Basically, play on your own for a bit to get the game into a place where it’s going to be more fun and impressive with a friend: taking on a friend going 90 mph in a car that handles like hell isn’t going to convince anyone this is worth it on a system that has so many other racing games.
For that reason, while fun with others, it’s more of a single-player experience. The only real downside to the game itself is that there just isn’t a lot of it: there are the same six courses, over and over again, and while there’s plenty to find and explore, it would have been better to maybe have fewer cars and more courses on which to drive them on. The racing itself isn’t the star, like in, I don’t know, Daytona USA, which, as an arcade cabinet racer first and foremost, has just a handful of tracks each time out. So more places to explore would have been preferable. What’s here, though, is still worth your time, especially if you don’t mind taking it a little slower at first. It’s more than just a weird concept: Beetle Adventure Racing is fun, too.
That being said, it’s also a game with licensed vehicles in it, which means you can’t find it anywhere these days since no one ever renews those licenses, dooming these games to the ether. You can always emulate, especially since it doesn’t have any kind of oddball N64 controller setup that makes it hard to play on a PC or whatever other device you have that can run N64 emulators, but a legitimate copy for original hardware isn’t costly, either: I bought a copy for $20 a couple of years back, and that price range has held steady on the secondary market since.
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