Uniracers stands out for me as the singularly weirdest racing game that I’ve ever played. And by ‘weirdest’ I mean ‘completely awesome’.
The game stars a series of unicycles who are compelled to race around tracks. Why do they race? It doesn’t matter. All that does matter is that you have to race against phantom unicycles across various tracks and win in order to make it to the next more difficult track.
And, man, your unicycles are fast!
I don’t think I’d ever have pegged a unicycle as being a racing vehicle, but then I’ve only seen them underneath clowns and jugglers. It turns out that when they’re unencumbered by the weight of a person and manage to come alive they gain super speed and the ability to do tricks. This is kind of important to know because each time you successfully pull off a trick you not only get points but you also get a speed boost. So you end up having to perform a series of tricks while keeping your eyes on the course and looking ahead on the track. It’s like this game was tailor-made to require fantastic muscle memory.
There are three types of activity to do in this game: racing to the end of a track, racing around a circuit, and doing tricks, and each of those has three levels of difficulty. They’re all pretty self-explanatory, you either have to get to the end of the race before your opponent does or you have to do a required number of tricks to succeed. But, where I really had fun with this game was its stats.
Yeah, I said ’stats’.
This game lets you choose between 16 identical colors of unicycle (except for color). You can name them anything you like, kind of. Mine wouldn’t let me name mine ‘basscomm’ because it thought it saw a naughty word lurking in there. But you can name them after the folks that you play the game with, so they get their own record set. Then you get to see how you and your friends rank up against each other. I would spend a lot of time trying to make sure that my unicycle was at the top of every category. Which I totally managed to do… except for one.
I invited a friend over to play the game shortly after I bought it, and we had a good time with it. He would end up winning more games than I would that day, though. But I pressed on! I played and played the game until I felt like I was some kind of unicycle racing master or some other such nonsense. And indeed, I was top-ranked in every category by far except for ‘Winning percentage’. It turns out that in the short time that I had played against my friend that he had handily gotten the better of me, so his win percentage was pretty astronomical, and although I had won dozens more games than he’d ever played, my percentage was still low because I had also lost more games then he had ever played.
Stupid math.