Quick playing 3D Realms Anthology Steam Edition – Wacky Wheels

On May 5th 2015 a large dump of old 3D Realms games unleashed on Steam as a bundle dubbed 3D Realms Anthology – Steam Edition. Now, trying to review the package as a whole would take a very long time, since there are 32 games in this collection and playing through each of them to completion would take a few weeks of my time, plus, the people that know these titles don’t need much explaining about what exactly these games are. What the release means is that finally all these old relics of years past can be played on current machines without any hassle – a simple click on the game in the Steam catalogue and you’re on your way playing old video games.

The first game I gave a spin on was Wacky Wheels, a kart racing game that originally came out for MS-DOS back in 1994. Wacky Wheels was strongly influenced by Super Mario Kart, except replace the Nintendo characters with random wildlife, such as a panda, elephant and tiger. Since there was nothing like Nintendo’s genre creating racing game on PC, the developers decided to create Wacky Wheels to offer something new to the computer crowd. It features power ups, multiple racing speeds, various flat tracks, which some look incredibly like they were borrowed straight out of Super Mario Kart’s design book, and power ups, but instead of comical bananas and red shells, you have hedgehogs, bombs and fireballs. There’s a versus battle mode included as well, for local multiplayer mayhem.

Performance wise, the game isn’t a port to Windows, rather, it uses Dosbox software to emulate the game on Steam, which also means that the user has some customisation over how the game displays and performs. One thing to note about Wacky Wheels is that the frame rate takes getting used to, as the game moves in a jerky manner that makes it seem like it is running around 15 frames per second, and the sound seems to skip every so often. I couldn’t tell if Dosbox could improve this issue ( I looked around the internet for answers, but got nothing), so that’s one thing to note when checking out Wacky Wheels. Once you get the hang of how the game performs, it ends up being enjoyable, but the performance issues won’t keep you with it for long before you become frustrated with it.

Check out the video below for my first 20 minutes with Wacky Wheels, a title that I had never played before until now. Wacky Wheels comes bundled in the 3D Realms Anthology – Steam Edition, currently on sale for £22.49