OMGJeremy

Humpday Gaming: Destruction Derby (PSX)

The launch lineup of the original PSX here in America was generally thought of as a wasteland of awful games that looked really, really good. Toshinden, NFL Gameday, that shitty ESPN extreme games game, they all looked amazing. But besides the erection-inducing graphics, the gameplay was generally absent. I’m pretty sure most dogs could play Toshinden at an expert level. It didn’t much matter though, as no one had ever seen graphics this damn good on a home console. Shit, most arcade games didn’t look this good. So none of us much cared if you could beat the games by rubbing your ass on the controller. At least they looked amazing while we were doing so. I wish I could say today’s game was different. But it was just another case of eye-melting graphics over gameplay that wasn’t much more advanced than a Tiger Electronics game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jAcOQBayDw

Destruction Derby delivered just what the name implied. It was one of the few games that ever offered up the honest to goodness, sweaty hillbilly destruction derby events that I remembered as a kid. The racing is almost secondary, as surviving the onslaught of cars made up of about four polygons each ramming into you over and over takes up the majority of the gameplay. It’s just a shame it wasn’t more fun to play. The tracks are so narrow that racing is just about impossible. Especially if there was any sort of pile up in front of you. And by God if there was, you may as well just restart the whole fucking race, because there’s no chance you’re gonna ever catch up with the assholes up front. Also the AI is on par with a child taking a Hotwheel and ramming it into a wall over and over again. But hey, at least it looked awesome!

And man did it. For the time, Destruction Derby was a shocking look at what the future of racing games would be. Tons of cars, awesome detail, lens flare coming off every light source you could imagine. It was a clear showcase of what the Playstation could do, and for the most part, we ate it up hard. I still remember playing this game for hours just because of how good it looked. It felt great to have family members walk by and be like, HOLY SHIT, LOOK AT THAT LENS FLARE. Actually they never said that. That was always just me. I was easily impressed as a child I suppose. But they sure did stop to watch more often times than not. For the time, it looked THAT good.

Alas, after the newness wore off of how good Playstation games could look, the sheen of those launch games wore off. While some went on to be classics (Wipeout, for one), the rest tried their hand at a few sequels before dying a lonely death in the clearance bin at Walmart. Destruction Derby tried a sequel that was actually a MUCH better game than the original, but by that time everyone had moved on to greener pastures. It just goes to show that you can date the prettiest bitch in the dance hall, but besides the looks, no one is going to give much of a shit beyond that. No matter how much lens flare she has.

Wait.