Motor Mash

Motor Mash is an ancient Sony Playstation game from 1997. It's a whopping 27 years old at the time of this review. The game lacks support for any modern gaming display resolutions (or widescreen monitors), hasn't been modernised or updated to run smoothly on modern gaming PCs. Despite this lack of modernisation, it carries a pretty high price tag for such an ancient game. This seems to have been put on Steam as a nostalgia gouge, or just a cash grab to try profit from abandonware. Motor Mash is just another rejected 2D arcade racing game, not a particularly popular genre to begin with, so failing badly at it was an impressive feat. You may be wondering why a crap rejected 1990's Playstation game belongs on Steam and the answer is, you're right, it doesn't. This is another abandonware cash grab by Piko Interactive, who swindle their hands onto old abandoned/broken/dead games then try to swindle Steam gamers into paying them for someone else's old abandoned game. Ethical? Nope. Gameplay is mediocre in this Mario Kart ripoff, lacking many of the features that made games like Mario Kart popular. The top down view instead of rear splitscreen proved unpopular, as well as the lackl…

A crude racing game that clearly stands as a cautionary tale of what not to do in development and publishing. I remember having more fun on [i]Super R.C. Pro-Am[/i] which was around since 1991, so the concept was not new by the time [i]Motor Mash[/i] was released in 1997, leaving it as a poor entry to a developed genre. As an early console port, it lacks mouse input and button hints. Pressing ESC shows a menu (with mouse input) where you can reach the input settings, but doesn't explain what the buttons do. The manual shows what the buttons do on a PS1 controller, but not keyboard controls. I felt like I was translating hieroglyphics to figure out the controls, and wrote a [url=https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2886429135]guide[/url] for it. You can't see far ahead of the car, so you rely on memory of the tracks, but it's not really fun enough to keep driving round again and again to build that memory. The disorienting camera angles compound the issue, alongside the crude controls that jank the car several degrees, making the narrow bridges and bottlenecks frustratingly difficult to line up. The AI opponents either seem to get stuck on the map so you leave th…

It's very much of its time. Only get it if you have found memories

Back in the days this was an awesome game. Something simular as the "Mashed" series on Xbox and Playstation. It was all good fun then but as it is now this game has aged like bad wine. I can't possibly recommend an old game that is not timeless. Go play something else instead. NOT RECOMMENDED! (anymore...)

https://youtu.be/z7-xSko3rTw Nearly 30 years later it's impossible to tell what passed as a high enough quality game to support a PC port of a PS1 top down racing game.

4/10