Lego Racers Can't Be Made Today
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- Опубліковано 12 січ 2024
- What makes LEGO Racers so captivating, why its unique systems were never seen again, and why they never will be.
I’m a small, part time creator who would love to have more time in the day to make videos. Liking, subscribing and sharing helps me to do that. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on Lego Racers and its systems in the comments.
Shoutout to the folks in the Lego Racers Speedrunning Discord, who helped me fact check this video: Jeynick, Bagel, VincentAuron, FlakesS, GeorgeMHall, and Jugebox98. Also thanks to Jeynick for the spinning white brick animation. / discord
#lego #racing #mariokart #speedrun #analysis - Ігри
Just wanted to say thanks for such a thoughtful in depth analysis focused on the design elements of Lego Racers. It was the 7th released game I worked on, but the first one I was given pretty much complete freedom to design whatever and however I wanted. It feels good to hear positive nostalgic memories highlighting and reaffirming those creative choices, even a quarter century later. The video was a pleasure to watch and made me smile, Thank you. 👍
Lego Racers was my childhood, thank you
This game is why I am in school to build race cars. Thank you for an amazing game that changed my life.
You are a legend
I'm a senior software engineer who grew up playing this game! Thanks for getting me to love the computer.
your game rules and you should be proud of your effort.
The worst thing lego did was stop making their original themes.
A tragic decision, to be sure, but certainly a profitable one.
@@JosephHarner Yup, I suppose it's naive to hope companies would have principles in today's age. Ones that come before profits at least.
I’m so confused because Lego… still has their own themes? Can you elaborate
It really takes away their own identity.
@@otherlego The remnants of their original stuff has basically just been folded into city, and the only other original stuff they do is ninjago, also the city based stuff doesn't have strong core narrative/characters like the older themes did.
Older themes had a lot more production value with things like tie in comics, their own websites and occasionally games or animated shorts, though admittedly those were on the rarer side. Look at something like Atlantis or Power Miners for example.
honestly they should bring back some of these old themes, like rock raiders, aquanauts, western, medieval, adventure, etc, i think kids would still love them, and especially returning fans would
I like them more than licensed themes by a mile but let's be real, licensed stuff simply sells better. There's no way well ever see this more creative side of Lego so strongly present ever again. Just the odd nostalgia release every now and then like when they brought back the pirate ship for a while
@@PoppySquidJrYeah. Bionicle taught LEGO that they needed strong IPs to compete in modern toy stores. At the time, the only real licensed product they had was Star Wars, and the success of that was tied to the movies, so they needed other products for when there wasn’t a new Star Wars movie. Now LEGO has a plethora of IP licenses, so they can always put something relevant on shelves; they don’t need strong in-house IPs like Bionicle anymore.
Rock Raiders was kinda modernised back in the mid-late 2000s with Power Miners and it was perfect. It had interesting lore, badass sets, and monsters that toed the line between creepy, cute, and cool. It was discontinued and I’ll never get over it. It’s my favorite theme of all time, even above gaming themes.
@@PoppySquidJr I disagree that the creative side’s gone. Creator has very few licensed sets and is full of awesome builds, while their adult sets often employ weird and wonderful building techniques, not to mention the masterpiece that is Ninjago City, perhaps the greatest set they’ve ever made. It’s fun and imaginative, full of creative techniques, and just as fun to build as it is to gawk at and play with. There are still plenty of original themes too, with some being simple and others being too ambitious for their own good.
@@ShenDoodles i never meant to imply that the creativity is entirely gone, it's just not as omnipresent as the entirety of Lego's image as it once was. I'm not dooming Lego as forever ruined or anything, just not quite what it once was, at least for me and my preferences. I still have a lot of fondness for Lego even today, but my favorite things Lego has ever done are all things they don't do much anymore, especially their unique takes on "standard" themes like knights, cowboys, space, etc. with their quirky characters and playful stories hinted within. Ninjago is the closest thing we have but it's really not quite the same vibe at all
I've never realized how unique Lego Racers was when I was a kid. As of today, I have yet to see a kart racing game that can top the warp boost. Also, literally no other racing game has shortcuts as unique as the ones on Magma Moon Marathon.
I know for a fact there's still some shortcuts that I have not found
Last year I was replaying the game casually and found two
I think what you're saying is that we just need a "LEGO Racers Remastered." 😊
Working on it. Aaaah ... So hard to get a cool gameplay (actually to get a gameplay) ... buuuuuuuuut .... Yeah I try to cook something. Maybe one day I could show something :)
Just to be more clear, I'm not trying to get a HD version of the game, the idea is to make it with a more modern gameplay but to keep its soul as most as possible.
@@20coasTer08 Not sure I understand. What made the original LEGO Racers game so special was the fact that it wasn't like modern racing games. If you make a modern racing game, then it isn't LEGO Racers anymore. I'm not quite sure how you can do both. LEGO Racers 2 tried to bridge the divide, and we all know how that turned out. Don't get me wrong; I really enjoyed LEGO Racers 2, (and, in fact, I have never played the original LEGO Racers). But I was often frustrated by the randomness and unclear explanation of the power-ups in LEGO Racers 2. The original LEGO Racers sounds like it chose an identity and stuck with it, instead of trying to be all things to all people.
@@kentslocum Well, it's a personal project. But I didn't want to do a graphic remaster only because its obvious that the gameplay of the game turned old. I replayed it for the purpose of my project obviously. But all the idea is to keep the heart of LR and give it a fresh breath. Not making some LR2 style or something.
So basically the concept is to modernize the racing gameplay itself to make something more smooth but still entertaining. It's a bit hard to explain in detail, I'm sorry. Just note that LR was maybe my first game ever and I love it and I want to make some kind of hommage to it by, in a way, making the Lego Racers Sequel I would love to get. But anyway there's a long journey to achieve to even get a small working gameplay thing yet. I just hope I could make it at this point.
@@20coasTer08 I just had an idea that might help for that :
Have some "multicolor" bricks ?
Basically those bricks would work more like mario kart's boxes (picking up a random item based on your rank), except here it'd just pickup a brick color based on your rank (such as 1st place gets no green, mostly yellow and blue bricks, with some red sometimes, middle ground get more ballanced of everything, and the low ranks get most of the red and green). That way the game has more control on how to balance itself and not being too easy.
Now that doesn't remove the color or white bricks from the game, but you could put them at more strategic places (such as, a green brick in a hard to reach spot, a shield in a spot where you might get hit by the environment, or where you need it to get through a shortcut ...)
Maybe you could also add more brick colors with some new effects, or add a new white brick tier (so now for the warp you'd need 4 white bricks), making the higher ranks harder to get.
The AI and controls could probably get some polish as well, especially the way you turn, and the way the walls "bounce" back ...
Why. It's playable today and it's still as fun as when it came out.
Paying coins in Mario Kart for shortcuts could be awesome. I always used to hate getting the coin item since they introduced it since it feels so dead in the hand, but it if you could use them for more than a small passive boost then getting the item might become really exciting.
Coins increase your max speed!!
Coins increase your max speed by up to 10% which is far more important than it sounds. Also coins are one of the oldest Mario kart items, and the first items seen by the player in the series.
Reminds me of Sonic R shortcuts and passage ways... If it increases your speed then it makes even more sense for them to be spendable on shortcuts.
Since they introduced coins? Coins have bin in Mario Kart from the very first game
@gon9684 I was expecting that to be brought up in the video! Sonic R is very rough overall but that idea was pretty good imo
We actually DID get a single player focused kart racer with unique mechanics with Team Sonic Racing, but Sega refused to market it well.
All Stars Racing Transformed, the prior game in the trilogy, was even better and people only remember it for the wacky crossovers
the Sonic racing games in general are WAY better than they have any right to be
It's crazy how sonic racing games went to simplistic lackluster game gear games & a poorly designed saturn game to masterpieces that at certain point somehow crossed over with ralph and banjo-kazooie
Maybe the, by far, worst game in the trilogy isn't exactly a good example. ASRT was phenomenal, though, and it's unfortunate that it didn't quite get the recognition it deserved.
I think the thing that killed TSR the most was a lack of crossplay. People who bought the game on Switch couldn't play with friends who bought the game on PC, and so on. That's a really bad thing to do to a fanbase that is already pretty fragmented across different platforms.
7:08 Wait, WHAT?! I’ve been playing this game since at least either 1999 or 2000 and I never knew the shortcut through the base shield had the code right there on the wall the whole time. I thought the coloured spotlight code for the shield was pure trial & error.
There's also a sound code you can hear when you drive through it and use it on the next lap.
@@KejserKagespiser I know that but I forgot to specify it was part of the trial & error I mentioned.
Yep, I figured it out pretty quickly and after haphazardly guessing I just said “okay what if I actually try that code it just showed me on the last lap?”
Loool duude 🤣🤣 it was one of my first shortcuts I found because of the red/blue high/low sound when you go through the doors before.
And funny thing is, my last found shortcut was the shield triggered one on the same map. Because I never used the shield anywhere outside Basil's boss run (against homing missiles).
I too thought, for some reason, that that one would only ever open to a shock attack...
I did a lot of boss bashing in this game. Where the goal wasn't to get first place, but to make the boss get last place. It was a fun way to spice up parts of the game that weren't a challenge anymore.
Great video - One underrated note is that Racers was robust and just ...worked. We had most of the 90s/2000s Lego PC games, and they were usually pretty unstable or wouldn't work at all. Racers ran perfectly on every PC I installed it on, and would run without the disc after installation. I'd put it on my friends' machines and we'd play it together - funnily enough on single player taking turns, or one friend driving and the other doing power-ups.
Lego Racers was THE game of my childhood. I had all the tracks memorised down to every brick location and all the shortcuts, and when I was not playing it, I was going around humming the themes and annoying my mum by pretending I am Jonny Thunder. My best friend had it too and we often played together and when we were at school, we would troll each other by drawing the mummy curse into each other's notebooks sneakily which meant the one who got cursed had to act confused for a while 😀
So many fond memories!
awesome XD
Well, the silver lining is that 20-ish years later, our beloved Rocket Racer got real in one form or another
Wait, when and how?
@@thomascircle245 Lego City Stuntz
@@thomascircle245 Besides two versions in Stuntz he was also in one of the Minifigures series
@@ENKTDeeColon_and_randomnumbers😮
I would say that yes, this type of game is against what most AAA companies do. But remember, we have a bustling indie industry in gaming right now
More of a cottage cheese industry than anything booming
The indie industry in question:
- Pixel art RPG that's a metaphor for depression
- Pixel art roguelike
- Pixel art deck builder
We need a middle ground between pixel art slop and triple-A slop. We should bring back the PS2/Wii-era double-A slop.
Cheap enough to mass-produce, but with enough production value so that ambitious and creative teams can achieve their creative vision in a reasonable amount of time.
@@vlc-cosplayerlord of the rings Gollum is exactly what you're looking for
There are double A kart racers today like Stampede Racing Royale
Nightmare kart lol
Great video! I made a lot of the sfx for this game, and that's actually me laughing as Johnny Racer. Oh the memories!
Did you also do the voice for King Kahuka?
No. I don't recall who did that. We used a lot of amateur theater actors for the vo. We had about 10 people run through all the character lines and then just picked the best one. It was a different time. lol @@joeywelander1833
That's awesome! Did you do any other character's voices?
Thank you for your contributions to this game!! That's so awesome to hear
He made his yt account 9 years ago, this actually tracks
I liked how in the second half, you re-analyzed lego racers with a more critical lens. Most videos like this would just end it at gushing over nostalgia.
Fun fact about the shortcut in 20:14:
You don't really need the shield to pass through that wall. The game checks if a human player has the shield active and if so, it blinks and lets anyone pass through it.
A CPU can't do it of course, but a rival human player can. I learned this the hard way when racing my friend who used MY active shield to get through there.
One thing that annoys me a bit about the game is that the car building lacks green bricks (and other colors too, but especially green).
While this sounds like a programming error where it just checks on A player rather than it being player-specific, you do bring up a really cool idea with this; player-specific shortcuts that only work if you play with at least one other human player... 🤔
Hi, I'm a speed runner for this game. The AI actually CAN activate it! They just have to be within a certain proximity of the shortcut. It's unfortunately not a viable strategy to get an NPC to activate it for you, but it can be done!
@@vincentauronward347 Ah nice, so it depends on the distance from the CPU and the shortcut... That's pretty interesting honestly. The more you know! xD
From a speedrunning perspective, I can imagine manipulating their path where they get a bit closer when they're near the shortcut might not be the only thing that's not viable but also how far behind or ahead (?) they are...?? Like some sort of "when the stars align" moment.
It is really cool to see it is possible at least! 😄
@@vincentauronward347 That's cool, thanks for clarifying.
I'm lurking in the Lego Speedrunning Discord server. I don't run the game myself, so I rarely post (I usually share funny characters I made).
That's hilarious.
"Lego 1K Drive" would've definitely been a more appropriate name for the sequel
Lego racers 3 is real
Unfortunately 2K Drive is a smoldering pile of garbage, rife with insane amounts of MTX
@@SlimeBlueMS yeah but if you look past that and put yourself in the shoes of a kid there is some value, hell even some value as an adult. Sure it’s boring but if you’re a kid or someone who likes Lego you’ll play 2k drive.
MTX? @@SlimeBlueMS
@@user-vi4xy1jw7e Microtransactions
It is sad that the single player aspect of racing games have disappeared over time. Back in the day there was Diddy Kong Racing and Crash Team Racing with their adventure modes, and Mario Kart DS' mission mode (kinda). LEGO Racers doesn't really have an adventure mode, though in my opinion, playing through the circuits feels like more of an adventure than cups in Mario Kart. But when you win the circuit, you unlock the circuit champion's car set, and get more customization options for your car. You also have this in the older Mario Kart games, but to me this felt more special, there was a connection between what you got and what you did. Why do you unlock Funky Kong in Mario Kart Wii by doing some time trials? Nobody knows, but in LEGO Racers, you unlock Captain Redbeard and his pirate/imperial buddies when you win his circuit. As a kid I would replay LEGO Racers over and over again, with new cars and/or challenges, but I haven't touched the cups in Mario Kart DS or Wii in forever. Also, the car customization in this game is amazing, I've never seen something like it.
20:40 The tracks Athens Dash and Daisy Circuit also have the piranha plant plyboards. But the one in Athens is never worth it, and the one in Daisy Circuit is always worth it, so not much decision making there.
I always just unlocked Mario Kart stuff through cheating. I wanted to play with my friends
@@jackthatmonkey8994 OK.
Crazy how many people grew up with this game! I grew up with Lego Racers 2 and never really enjoyed Lego Racers 1 but I never realized just how different the 2 were
I loved Lego Racers 1 and playing it non stop. I got Lego Racers 2 and it wouldn't work on the family PC :( That was when i realized sequels aren't always better
I can honestly say that Lego Racers was the first game that ever scared me. So many things in this game caused 5 year-old me great distress. All the bosses, those Mummy things, the horror themed tracks, this game's got real jumpscares too. Can't recall playing any other game with the same sort of aesthetic as Lego Racers, and this video's the first time I'm hearing about that shield shortcut. Maybe an indie dev out there could work some of this game's ideas into their own thing
The forest map was terrifying
I used to think halo was a gritty horror shooter back when I was 5 watching my cousin play... Makes me laugh now
Hugely underrated channel, keep making amazing work dude.
what are you doing here josh?
@@fencingfireferret1188 watching a fantastic video about lego racers.
How in the world did this random channel get JoshStrifeHayes already commenting with less than 3,000 subscribers? That's impossible.
Oh hi Mister Dry Face.
@@MatthewCenance similar niche tastes?
The only recent game that was attempted like this was LEGO Legacy: Heroes Unboxed. It was a single-player focused, free-to-play mobile game similar to Raid: Shadow Legends. It had mostly classic characters like Basil, and you could unlock their sets for bonuses and trivia. But the game did poorly, they added Ghostbusters to try to get licensed IP in there, and now it shut down.
They revived the game for Netflix, now it's free to play with no pay-to-win! Although unfortunately still quite a tedious grind so I got bored of it quick.
@@aceman0000099annoyingly, often if you remove the unnecessarily frustrating parts from pay to win games it becomes pretty obvious that they're just not that good.
I think as a free player, you convince yourself that the bored and frustration caused by a pay to win game is the result of you not having paid and you're much more forgiving about arbitrary count down timers and grindy gameplay.
I can't say I ever played Heroes Unboxed, or even RAID, but when we were in highschool and android games were new it was incredibly easy to hack the games so we realised pretty quickly that these mechanics kind of suck.
The crazy thing is, our smartphones are powerful enough to easily emulate the games we loved as kids, but for some reason we prefer to play "easy" app store games that suck up time and dribble out a steady stream of dopamine regardless of your effort level.
It's crazy that you can't buy official ports of all the GBA games for example, or even just an official GameBoy emulator which you can buy official games for.
I guess if they did that nobody would need a Nintendo Switch to play the old Nintendo catalogue, but honestly it's pretty easy to find the emulator and roms by yourself so I think they're losing money by not offering it.
Hearing someone talk about Lego Racers in 2024 gave some whiplash. Used to play the hell out of it with my cousin on the N64. I always thought the different parts had different hidden stat values, and would pick the fantasy theme cause it was the "fastest."
Lol you're crazy, the space themed parts were obviously faster!
In general I hate the term "Can't be made today" because usually it can be but the people behind it are too scared to do it. However, I do agree you make some compelling arguments. As a lego fan I do bemoan the fact that Ninjago is pretty much the only franchise theme that didn't exist somewhere else first. Sure, I love the Star Wars sets and I just preordered the Zelda set, but back in the 80s I loved the Pirates theme. It was so much fun. The Pirates of the Carribbean theme, not so much as they were just scenes from the movie. They didn't have their own identity like the old Pirates. I'd rather have Lion Knights than Lord of the Rings. I'd rather have Blacktron than Star Wars. Lego needs to get its identity back before something like Lego Racers "Smash Bros" style character setup again.
I guess there were similar franchises to LEGO Chima already. The series might be like if Thundercats was full on fantasy and not science fantasy.
Especially considering how huge the Indie Game Scene is these days. Like, all it takes is some lone dev or small dev team wanting a modern take on the game to make a spiritual successor. It’s not that a Lego Racers-like game can’t be made. It’s that the major development studios are too focused on maximizing profits for their corporate overlords, and indies haven’t taken an interest in the genre.
I'm with you on Basil the Batlord - wish I could have had one of those sets too
Wanted to point out ModNation Racers which is the closest we got to Lego Racers
Yep, great power up system, great customisation. The lucky elite who got to play both of these as a child...
I really feel like modnation took direct inspiration from lego racers.
LittleBigPlanet Karting was also really good. It was basically ModNation 3 (same team & engine, I think), and it even allowed you to customize the kart handling and make the game feel wildly different.
@@theidiotchildren unfortunately that killed the mod nation Devs in the end 🫤
(Well, triad wars did, but whatever)
I wish they supported their original themes more now, I watched so many cool themes fade in favor of big IPs.
part of this is due to their target audience getting older
@@theX24968ZThat's not exactly it, it's more like the target audience has expanded to include people who were huge fans as kids but have grown up.
I'm sure the vast majority of their customers are still kids, or parents of kids but their grown up customers are willing to spend 5-10 times more on a given set than the kids are.
I think it's really dissapointing how few original themes there are. Kids vastly prefer original themes to play with than licensed IPs.
Original themes allow for much more creative play and playing with licensed IP means basically just re-enacting the show they're from. Much less creative, and much less compelling for kids.
Unfortunately, when they're walking around the toy store, or browsing the catalogue in the lead up to a birthday, the licensed sets SEEM more fun. Kids are more likely to shell out for the brands and icons they recognise, even though they're ultimately less fun, because kids don't think about that sort of stuff.
Telking the kids at school you got the new Star Wars set is more impressive a brag than saying you got a really good Castle or Police Station.
If they're anything like me though, the generic sets were the ones most often rebuilt because they were easy to fit into the story of whatever the game happened to be about that day.
When we played Lego Star Wars, you always knew the good guys had to win, you knew what ships belonged to what sides and what all their capabilities were.
Sure you could use your death star to blow up a planet, but you can't ever kill Luke Skywalker and Yoda never gets to drive a mech.
Way more fun if one of us played as the Martians while the other played as humans. Either side can have whatever you're clever enough to build from the pieces in the box.
I remember racing my brothers to get all the cool transparent pieces out because those obviously made your guys the most powerful.
For as much as I've played Lego Racers back in the day, I never new how in depth the item system was.
It's still my favorite to this day, but never new it was this skill based and varied
holy crap that was the biggest nostalgia trip ever
Nice video. They actually had a system like you describe in Sonic R where you paid a certain amount of rings to access shortcuts. I never got the chance to play it in multiplayer, but it's possible it could have balanced things for people towards the back.
This was the first game I 100% played through as a kid. Getting Vroni Volt's car was insanely difficult as kid. You had to near perfectly execute every racetrack + powerups👀
a modern release of lego racers would be so unbelievably fire
Be careful what you wish for.
Besides, they'd probably once again shove live service microtransactions and stuff into it.
Lego Racers is one of my favorite games of all time. I still remember the day we went out to the store to buy it. On our first day playing, we couldn’t even beat Captain Redbeard. When we first beat him, it was SO exciting to unlock the next level.
To make a Lego Racers style power-up system work for multiplayer, you'd need to make some changes, even more so than time trial did.
Yes, you can give an advantage to players that lag behind: You'd just make the "initial" set of power-ups that spawn in one location different from the set that can replace them.
And if you make lapping impossible, then that gives you a short period of time between rounds where you can reset power-ups from their "re-spawned" ones to their "initial" set. Obviously you'd use that to give the lead player(s) less greens (and 1/3 or so less yellows).
Also, you can introduce randomness without completely abandoning the "pick your color of choice" system. Each spawn location can have a random spawn set (instead of always spawning reds or whites as in single player). Both of the suggestions so far make it so that you still get what you pick up, but what you can pick up will vary from race to race.
And there's nothing keeping you from introducing a "rainbow colored" brick, that will turn into one of the 4 colors on pickup. And maybe a black brick, that has a chance to turn into either a white OR one of the 4 colors, making it a gamble to pick it up if you already have your color of choice. And nobody would complain if the chances of getting greens from those depended slightly on situation (you being in the lead/it being from an "initial" or "re-spawned" set, pick up location, ..., the date being April 1st or Friday the 13th).
And finally, there's nothing keeping the devs from making the warp less powerful when you're in the lead. Nobody would complain if the warp seemed to take you random distances in MP. (And the speed boost multipliers could also be changed depending on where you were when you activated them. Nobody likes rubber-banding in normal drive mode; but speed boosts are something you get extra, and getting less extra feels less annoying than having something taken from you.)
Also, everything you say about shortcuts is true, except for one thing: They can't really be hidden, because you can just see other players take them.
subbed after the DKR reference. great and intelligent vid!
Anyone who knows of the existence of DKR deserves to have a happy and prosperous life.
I mean the answer seems obvious to me. Have static power-ups, but you get upgrades upfront if you're behind. For something like Lego Racers specifically it'd probably be better to use distance instead of placing, so like First Place will only ever get the bricks they pick up, there's a range behind First Place that also only gets the bricks they pick up, but behind that range picking up a colored brick comes with a bonus white brick, behind that has two bonus white bricks, and at the extreme end behind that (like "you've already been lapped by first" behind that) gets three white bricks for free when getting a colored brick so that catching up with an insta-warp is possible. Alternately, spamming cages is possible if being a menace is more important than winning.
Also, Triple A is very bad and I don't want it to exist anymore.
The only other racing game I saw go this hard on the shortcuts was BEETLE ADVENTURE RACING for the N64. That game was built around opening up massive shortcuts and that is exactly why I loved it so much!
Great video! To add to the list at 15:20: we have DREAMZzz now too. Still not a long list but it's something. I like that you went super detailed on the shortcuts. Never really thought about how it would work in a multiplayer setting. I love the fact that people still remember this game fondly. We can only wish that they create something similar for the modern times.
I've recreated the intro animations of the game but with modern graphics, to hopefully show Lego how cool this game was and maybe it sparks a move from them. But we can only dream. 😋
Also as an addendum, we finally got Rocket Racer as a minifigure not once, but TWICE in LEGO City Stuntz. But sadly this goes back to the "LEGO City as one of the few unlicensed evergreen themes" argument.Even this year we are rumored to have Johnny Thunder, but not in a new Adventurers line, but rather a LEGO City Jungle line. LEGO City is a profitable aspect of original LEGO properties, but that makes every fantasy or action theme homogenized into itself and taking away most of its fantasy elements (even though Space this year opened with some lime-green aliens and more flashy spacecraft designs).
@@Maniac4Bricks I don’t understand the City theme anymore. Might as well remove the theme from the box if everything is City. 😜
They could do something fun with the Speed Champions theme. Having a cool Johnny Thunder style race car would be great. 😜
@@StudframeAnimationsI'm pretty annoyed that it includes aliens and other sci-fi elements when it seems to me that they could be two distinct themes.
Aliens are a really easy theme to add some light plot and character details to sets in a way that Lego tries to avoid for the City theme.
City should have space stuff, but I'd prefer if it was just realistic space stuff like rockets, rovers and a moon base.
One of the harder aspects to designing a new lego theme is making it exciting while also keeping it accessible. Aliens are almost ideal villains for a kid's product because they can be scary but also silly.
Villains give you an excuse to design some cool robots and tactical looking sci-fi vehicles.
It's not that I don't think you shoulf be allowed to have aliens in your Lego City, of course you should, I just worry that we're missing out on stranger set designs because we're limited to things that fit the Lego City aesthetic.
It seems unlikely that they'll bring out an alternative space theme when the current lego city sets include mechas, aliens and so on. Space/Future tech covers a lot of ideas and I don't think there's enough room within the Lego City label for all of it.
@@SineN0mine3 We’re lucky that LEGO has made a lot of cool space themes in the 90s. Seems like we have to keep updating those ourself to keep the interesting space themes alive. 😜
Always love seeing small creators going this deep into such niche content and producing something so informative and high quality.
ive never heard such an in-depth analysis on any lego game ever
Banger video, glad to have gotten this randomly recommended
Kirby's air ride has the enemies in the same area but trying to catch them is the problem.
Seems the algorithm started recommending this video, and I am glad it did. I have always loved versatile or upgradeable power ups in kart games, it made me remember ModNation Racers as well.
Dude, THANK YOU. I forgot all about this game and you just opened a floodgate of memories. I absolutely loved this game as a kid.
inb4 this blows up, amazing vid! Great quality content
As a dedicated LEGO fan, who grew up with this game, and has many of the sets that were in the game, this really was an amazing video. It spoke to my heart.
MAN this is a nostalgia blast! and you captured so much of what made it great! I kinda want to play the champaign through again now!
I could see an indie racing game with similarities to Lego Racers happening. Like the same kind of shortcut system and customization of that game.
I agree with you about the living nostalgia that those early games had because of the crossover-ness of physical LEGO play. That's why I'm making my LEGO game concept so I can relive the old themes the way I imagined them to be. One of my back burner tasks was to make a simple racing mage so I might have to take some tips from LEGO Racers that you pointed out.
Great video Tin Sensei! As a seasoned LEGO Racers speedrunner I can tell you you did it justice. Here's some memorable things I wanted to mention:
8:49 This is what we call a "Flakes moment" (Don't come after me Flakes😂)
12:41 I applaud you for this amazing joke.
13:22 "LEGO Racers was basically the Super Smash Bros. of LEGO." I never thought of this myself this way, but truer words have not been spoken about the game. It's truly how it felt playing this as a kid. I think I will quote this many times from now.
As a fellow video editor I can only praise you for putting this video together so well. Cheers and I'll stick around for the future!
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Wow, this was a fun throwback. I loved this game and played it nonstop with a friend when it came out in 1999. I also adored Lego Alpha Team which is never talked about but introduced me to puzzle games that I still love today.
Lego Racers was and always will be my favorite kart racer, excellent work explaining how complex the game system is!
Not a Lego fan, more of a UA-cam videos on games fan, and this is top quality
Honestly, I always get very excited when I see people talk about the old Pre-LEGO Star Wars games. Sure a decent bit of it is because of nostalgia, and these games haven't all aged the best as you highlighted very well, but it's nice to see people still being passionate about them (myself included). Great video and keep up the good work ^^
Boy I sure did forget about this childhood classic until this video came across my timeline. Thanks for the awesome video!
I never knew that on a moon level you have to look and remember gate colors from a screen. I always used sound clue: they always make a series of beeps when you pass this area and beep tone corresponds to blue/red gates.
Grip Combat Racing is pretty good about shortcuts, not a cart racer I know, but it's the first modern thing, that came to my mind. Most shortcuts have you trade off safely passing an obstacle with doing it the more risky way. You also have traps that you can shoot with missiles to trigger them. It also has a pretty cool mechanic, where you have two item slots and based on the situation you can upgrade one of the items with the other, freeing up another spot. This enables you to strategize a bit more.
Sometimes I see long forgotten things from my youth and a certain part of my brain feels funny, and seeing that bat-helmet definitely did that!
7: 23 I dont think I ever got that to work as a kid :0
Amazing to go back to this game, i loved it
always loved this game, it’s great seeing a video on it! (plus the On Cinema reference is very appreciated)
7:38 WHAAAT I never knew about that one!
8:31 How did I never discover that one either?? I traced up and down that track all the time as a kid looking for a shortcut
Great video.
I must say you are missing one potential spiritual successor, and that's Modnation Racers! Same power up system, same type of shortcuts, and same focus on customization.
damn, i had that bat helmet! This gave me so many flashbacks to my childhood. Awesome stuff my man!
This video was like being curb-stomped by forgotten nostalgia, in the best way. Thank you for making it!
I have a core memory of being in daycare, crowded around a pc with a bunch of other kids my age watching somebody play and shouting “USE IT” all in unison whenever a warp was in play. I had no idea what was going on and was enthralled.
This game was the original hype creator and is without a doubt what induced my love for video games
Outstanding video. It did my head in having the clip of the warp transition to the mountain biking. I also loved the "hey!" from Voltage when Basil stile the green brick.
Fun fact at 14:30 in the cinematic the colour of Rocky Racer's arms are reversed. Ingame his left arm is blue and the right is red. It's been a 2 and a half decade long debate about whether RR is Ausie or not and I guess we now have confirmation.
I partially agree with your conclusions about why the LR powerup system won't (and hasn't) been created in a modern game. I think that a brand new IP called Rego Lacers could made and be everything Lego Racers was and more... It could be a truely amazing game... That no one would buy. It's not marketable at all in 2023. A single-player cartoon racer just won't sell. It may have a niche audience, i.e. just me, but LR was made when multiplayer racers were still being popularised and a single player cartoon racer was acceptance.
Well done on the video and thanks for covering such an underrated game!
I'm not sure why we went with an australian accent for RR. I think I was just messing about and it stuck.
Speaking of paying to use shortcuts, I feel I have to bring up Split/Second. That racing game that disney interactive put out right before it was shuttered. The balancing that they did I thought was really well executed. Because you had to decide on using the "currency" to either destroy the other racers and set them back, or use it to move up in position or widen your lead using shortcuts. Hands down still one of my favorites.
This ^
The color-based shortcut was really interesting! I hope we see something like that in a modern racing game
I loved Lego Racers when growing up. My brothers & I sank hours into that game.
I miss that the older Lego models where very simple. Like they didn't have to make a whole set of specialty parts. Most of the sets were made out of parts that are common and could be found in other sets. Like rocket racer's car for instance, it was made out of common bricks. Unless you count the jet engines, they didn't have to make a whole new piece to make it look cool. 2k fills some nostalgia void but not fully. It has the spirit of making something out of nothing but it feels sullied by the fact it has so many more parts available to use.
Honestly, I count all the specialty parts as the downfall of _LEGO._ Everything used to be compatible with everything else, which was sort of the point. Around the turn of the millennium, there became a marketing shift towards specialty sets and licensed properties (like Star Wars), and then soon after, it became all about the minifigs.
In the 90's, minifigs were still sort of bland, and there were only a few themes for sets, like castle/woodsman, space, pirate, and town. It was better that way, because you could build (your collection) in the general direction of your interests. Thing is, if you can already build anything you want with the parts you have, then you aren't buying more _LEGO._ Specialty parts meant you'd always 'need' something else. It became more about buying than building.
Thank you for such an in-depth analysis on what looked like an uber fun game when I was a child. I loved lego pc games, Racers, Stunt Rally, Rock Raiders, Legoland, Chess, and another where you could build stuff from bricks. Those were the times.
Lego Racers was completely unique (as far as I know) in that it allowed you to _choose_ what powerup you got by selecting which color brick you picked up, instead of being given something random. It made the game strategic, so that you could choose a more offensive approach with a red brick if you were behind, or defensive with a blue brick if you knew that Gypsy Moth just picked up Homing Rockets (again). Yeah, it made a lot of races really lopsided once you learned how and when to use the warp, but the lopsidedness was what made it so fun! And it was part of what made the hosting champions seem unbeatable until you learned their strategies. I was soooo disappointed when the sequel completely abandoned this mechanic.
18:38 For Diddy Kong Racing, not counting its re-release remake on DS, it is supposed to get sequel treatments. However, because its developer Rare was purchased by Microsoft, all of its sequel plans were canceled
to be fair, I think it's good that they bounced around, like a young person doing different jobs to figure out what they like, they also did original things each time. we got new stuff., which is one of the biggest issues in games nowadays. Why not lego racers 2? I loved 2. Was 1 better? in its own way... but I think it was good that they branched out every time.
The original Lego Racers was one of my favourite games for a long period of my childhood. The powerup system and the way it made you strategise was one of my favourite features.
Bounced completely off Lego Racers 2, don't remember playing it enough to have many strong memories of it.
The shortcuts remind me of Sonic Riders.
That game was also very creative.
16:59 don't think I didn't notice the Streets of Sim City music 👀
LR2 had shortcuts... it's been too long since I played to recall the exact tracks, but Mars and Arctic had some very notable shortcuts that were usually shorter (well, duh) but had no powerups or avoided the repair zones (and repair zones almost always involved taking a longer path than ignoring repair.)
I think LR2 is really slept on, because it had unique mechanics of its own, such as the vehicle destructibility and how that played into map design. I never played LR1, but given the gameplay I've seen of it for all these years I think I'd basically always prefer LR2's setup and maps.
Seeing these shortcuts has blown my mind! Played this to death when I was younger and had no clue!
That theme song… made me feel like a kid again. I remember playing that game as a kid. Thank you so much for the nostalgia.
I miss the feeling lego racers 1 gave me.. Was great diving back into it in the form of this video tho!
W video
comment for traction boost. neat vid. super cool to hear someone talk so passionately in depth about a forgotten games systems. definitely something I personally wouldn't have considered more than superficially. really cool vid, kudos.
I grew up with lego racers, and this video absolutely nails every single part of what made it so cool. You evidently did your research and everything is well thought out. Awesome watch, subbed!
I miss ModNation Racers
Did anyone else like Lego games before Traveler's Tales made licensed Lego movie games? I really enjoyed the classics like Rock Raiders, Lego Racers and especially Lego Island. I liked playing with the toys too, my favorite were the Johnny Thunder sets which drew inspiration from Indiana Jones. On another note I wish Traveler's Tales made more non-Lego games too.
I can understand. The only non-Lego game i remember Traveler’s Tales made were Sonic 3D Blast and Sonic R
I dont think ive ever seen a video on Lego Racers till now, and i cant believe how much i can remember of it upon watching this. Great vid.
It was crazy all the things you had to know to be good at this game, like the combination door and using the cannon to open shortcuts. Because some of the bosses use those shortcuts you learn them pretty quick. Really nice touch.
Lego Island mentioned🫡
Lego Racers is great but you forgot to mention one major flaw. The power-up bricks all look the same except for the color. Making them indistinguishable for color blind players, which is about 5% of people. Quite an oversight imho
This was really insightful, great analysis of a classic. I grew up playing Racers and loved everything about it.
You've blown my mind - I thought I knew all the shortcuts back in the day, but you've taught me two more, plus explained how the moon base doors shortcut actually worked
I liked this man. Gonna go back and watch your other stuff later tonight.
Great video, pal 😄 Lego Racers was & is a really special game to me - as a little kid we rented it back-to-back from the local library for weeks on end and I adored it. I spent a lot of hours playing with my dad, and to this day I know all the tracks and all the music.
It felt like a real feat to complete all the circuit races, and I still remember getting Veronica Voltage's car set. Honestly my most treasured gaming memories are from this game.
I still loved Lego Racers 2, but it didn't have the same simple charm
Oh my god, a DKR reference. Five bags of popcorn and a gold Lego brick.
This was an insightful video to watch, and to add to it, Crash Team Racing on the PS1 very much was a single player focused kart racer with shortcut systems much like Lego Racers, including challenges and non-racing/battle modes to earn unlockables from as well. It did also have a well developed multiplayer side to it as well, but its single player campaign mode was definitely the core of CTR.
LEGO Racers was one of my favorite games when I was a kid. I had a few other LEGO games as well like Rock Raiders and LEGO Island, but Racers was always my favorite. We got rid of the game at some point when we had to also get rid of our old computer, but I’ve been feeling nostalgic for Racers lately. This video was both a great analysis and a wonderful trip down memory lane. I hope maybe I’ll be able to come across an old copy of Racers one day and relive those memories.
An obvious problem that comes to mind with adding Lego Racers style shortcuts to a Mario Kart style game is that they're designed around the different power up mechanics. Not only does Lego Racers place specific items in its shortcuts, but by requiring specific items to open them you create a situation where if you don't have fixed items then it becomes RNG dependent whether or not a player can access that shortcut. Mario Kart pretty much only locks shortcuts behind boosts because they're the most common item in the game, and the only item in time trials, so that reduces the RNG aspect.
I didn't know there were so many shortcuts. I only found a couple of them as a kid, maybe one per track.
Your explanation of multiplayer considerations at the end got me thinking, and I had an idea that may be a little bit stupid. Randomized shortcuts. Each track has 12-15 shortcuts made for it, and for each race, 3-6 shortcuts were available for use, but were completely randomly selected. It'd mean you'd have to actively pay attention to which ones are available in the moment, or miss it and go for it in the next lap. The main issue I can think of with this would be speedrunning, as it'd be entirely rng at this point, but maybe single player modes have set shortcuts that aren't random. Just a little idea I had.