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Up to eight players can race over twenty-seven courses, rumble in a battle arena or play car soccer in this multiplatform cart racer.
Street Racer is a cart-racing game, developed by Vivid Image and published by Ubisoft and inspired heavily by Super Mario Kart, and the first of its genre to allow 8 players to race simultaneously on split-screen. The game performed very poorly commercially on all systems, particularly selling badly on the PlayStation compared to other racing games released in the same year, and the decision was made to give the game a price drop almost immediately upon release due to poor initial sales figures. The game is now classed as very rare to find.
The game features 9 characters and 8 tracks, and several different game modes. The 'Championship' mode is essentially a set of races with increasing difficulty. Once a player completes the 'Championship' mode on Bronze difficulty, they can play through again on Silver, then Gold, and ultimately Platinum.The game also allows for players to cherry pick their own tracks and settings to create a Custom Championship. Head-to-head racing with a CPU driver is also an option, along with practice races.
The most unique aspect of Street Racer however is its Rumble mode, in which the 8 drivers begin facing each other in a circular arena with a destructible outer barrier along the edge with the objective of the mode being to be the Last Man Standing in the ring. To win, one player has to eliminate all of their opponents using the in-built weapons/abilities on each car or by simply punching the other players out of the ring (an ability that was available to all drivers). These offensive aspects of the game are also included in the race mode: weapons were not in the form of pickups like in Super Mario Kart, but rather each car had its own specific recharging weapons/abilities to suit the driver. For example, Frank Instein's car had the ability to grow bat wings and fly.