Every week of late I seem to pop up here with another new arcade racer to talk about, and well, I wouldn’t want to break the streak. This week’s new hotness is Parking Garage Rally Circuit, which is about powersliding around multi-storey car parks and is designed to look like a lost Sega Saturn game. It now has a release date: September 20th.
Chunky polygons? Check. Halftone effects to make those pixels pop? Yep. Anti-aliasing? No way.
Set in a future where American parking garages have been, for some reason, turned into race courses, you drift around corners and chain together “Mario Kart-style boosts” to win races and time trials. There are 8 cars to unlock, three car classes of increasing difficulty to drive, and online leaderboards to climb.
It’s also got online multiplayer for up to 8 players. Most of these arcade racers lack that, favouring split-screen if anything, so for that reason alone I’ll give Parking Garage a shot.
Parking Garage Rally Circuit is mainly the work of indie dev Walaber, a name that caused a sort of cerebral itch when I heard it. That’s because he was responsible for a number of beloved early physics games in the ’00s, such as JellyCar and Trampoline. Walaber’s own site has a history page that runs down some of his old work.
My only problem with the look of Parking Garage Rally Circuit so far is that powersliding around parking garages gives me terrible flashbacks to trying to pass the tutorial in Driver one the PSone. Kids these days don’t know the terrible shame and anger of renting a game from the video store for two days with your pocket money and spending the entire time just trying to get to the first mission.
I’m sure Parking Garage Rally Circuit won’t do me dirty like that. It’ll be out on Steam in two weeks.