When I fired up Beetle Crazy Cup (BCC), I couldn't help but remember a game I had played on my friends N64 a few months ago, a game called Beetle Adventure Racing. I thought that this was going to be another lame, half-assed port to the PC. Thankfully, I was wrong, sort of. It was lame, but it wasn't a port. BCC has some interesting features that, while have been in other games, haven't been packaged into one game. Too bad BCC didn't do that well of a job perfecting the features, it comes off looking like a children's game.

The game starts with a big splash screen that looks like it was inspired by Austin Powers. Once at the menu, you can choose whether to participate in a Beetle Crazy Cup, a Championship, or just a Quick Race, which is to just goof around in one specific event. The events, Jump, Cross, Speed, Buggy and Monster, all appear to offer different types of racing. The Jump mode was interesting, but after I broke my record a couple of times, it became pretty boring. Cross, Speed, Buggy and Monster are all pretty similar, they just change the course around a bit and give you a different car. It seems like the developers, Xpiral, tried to take the look from Need for Speed: High Stakes and the simplicity, and almost cartoonish feel, of Beetle Adventure Racing, and it just comes across as a cheap imitation of both. The track design is unimaginative and it seems like the new tracks I unlocked, by winning more cups, were just cheap rehashes of the old ones, with a new twist or turn. Also, like Need for Speed: High Stakes, BCC uses night racing, but whereas NFS: HS car lights looked real, it seems that in BCC the lights just consist of one light source in front of the road and one right in front of the car. I think that they just wanted to squeeze a few more tracks out, so they made some of them drivable at night. The car selection was also hurting. The "different" cars often consisted of the same car with just a different paint job.

The sound isn't effective at all - I thought that I would get amazing sound coming out of my subwoofer - instead I got tiny little screeches of tires, and the bleep! of wimpy horns. For the longest time I thought that something was wrong with the sound whenever one of the computer opponents honked at me. (Since this game wasn't developed in North America, I guess that's what the horns sound like in France.)

The game is fun to play for a while, but gets boring - fast. BCC doesn't have anything special in it that other racing games these days do. It doesn't have the weapons of Carmaggedon, the graphics of Need for Speed, or the detail of other racing Simulators. The graphics are on par - nothing ground breaking, but it doesn't look horrible. The crowd looks absolutely terrible. It's just one big sprite that doesn't even move, it just stands there and looks one-dimensional.

As for multiplay, you have two options to chose from: split screen and IPX. The split screen was difficult to play as it was pretty much impossible to accurately judge distance, corners, etc., due to the shrunk screen. I don't have access to an IPX network and I found it strange they didn't include a TCP/IP option, as it is used more than IPX these days. Control is simple. Accelerate, Brake, Left/Right, and Turbo. There's also a Honk button, but seeing as it serves no purpose whatsoever, I didn't bother listing it.

In closing, is BCC actually worth picking up? I suppose, if you need a light racing game that's not too difficult to learn. Otherwise, stick to Need for Speed: High Stakes for your racing fix.