Reviews

One of my favourite cartoons on the ZX Spectrum, well actually it left me with a bad taste in my mouth frankly, okay it's not too bad but I don't know I'm perhaps expecting better?

It doesn't feel like Wacky Races, it just feels like a standard racer to me, and why does Mutley rip of Mario in this game. If I seen this I would definately bought it, and then I would have been bitterly disappointed in it, what a great shame.

1992 Hi-Tec (UK)
by Fred O'Rourke, Sean Conran, Richard Morton. Developed by Robin Holman and Mick Hanrahan

Another Hanna Barbera game that is really cute and captures the atmosphere of the cartoons. The graphics could look a bit more faithful to the original but work fine. You command both Dick Dastardlys car in some levels and Mutley in others.
With the car you enter races, with Mutley you play a sort of catch-bonus level.
I find the game really hard, it took me a lot of practice to reach level 2.

Being a long-time fan of the cartoon series, I was expecting some nice rendition from Hi-Tec, which was responsible for several other interesting Spectrum games based on Hanna-Barbera characters.

Unfortunately I was severely disappointed. You only get to command Dick Dastardly in a series of feeble attempts to arrive first to the race by carrying out the usual dirty tricks. Bland monochrome graphics, repetitive action and superficial player involvement mean the game does never really take off. A real waste of a potentially great license.

Wacky Races is one Hanna-Barbara game from Hi-Tec that could and SHOULD have worked, but for one reason or another it doesn't. Originally it was written by Robin “Orb” Holman and Mick Hanrahan and it was in colour, then when they left it was given to a new team and they changed it to monochrome, and you know you're in for a monochrome game with one look at the soulless plain yellow loading screen. The graphics aren't great as a result, nicely drawn but dark blue is not a good choice of colour, even white would have been best I feel. Also the gameplay, I find it weird seeing different enemies to hit and avoid other than those you are racing, who seem to do very little to you anyway. Also, of all the characters to be, you are Dick Dastardly, the antagonist as well as the one character who never wins. Talk about a waste of a license, and of all the Hanna-Barbara licenses to obtain this you'd think would have been the jackpot for Hi-Tec, but instead this turned out to be one of the last games they released before folding months later. Shame, because they had some good games Hi-Tec but towards the end the quality of their games were diminishing, this and the god awful Jetsons game being the catalysts of that.