So, I'm still playing Moon, heading into what I think is the game's last dungeon. Like I said last time I wrote about Moon, this is a good if somewhat inexplicable game... but it succumbs to one heartbreaking flaw. I'm not calling Renegade Kid out for this especially hard, because a lot of really great games have embraced this idiotic design flaw, too.
I'm talking about the Mandatory Racing Sequence, where a game's standard play - which is not racing - briefly stops. You are then forced to play some sort of racing game if you want to proceed. The idea behind the Mandatory Racing Sequence seems to be that developers are concerned that players will get bored just doing one thing (even if it's what a player bought the game to do). The race is meant to be a little change-up in gameplay that will keep players interested.
Problem: these racing sequences are almost always a thousand times worse than anything else the game has to offer. Either the developers didn't have time to build a proper engine for the racing sequence and the controls are awkward, or whatever they did build is too unpolished to be any fun. What was meant as a fun distraction becomes a hateful chore.
Probably the most recognizable example of hateful Mandatory Racing Sequences are the ones in Super Mario Sunshine, which were entirely mandatory and featured spectacularly awful controls. These returned as the hateful "ray-surfing" racing sequences in Super Mario Galaxy, which actually feel a thousand times worse in context because Galaxy is otherwise a much better game than Sunshine. Also, you couldn't lose in Sunshine until you hit an obstacle, while Galaxy lets you enjoy the fantastic option of repeatedly flinging your manta ray off the side of the course into oblivion. At least some of the Galaxy courses are skippable...
Ah, but back to Moon's Mandatory Racing Sequence. I'm going to describe this to you, because I have a very hard time believing it got through QA in what is otherwise a tremendously polished game. Basically, about one-third of the way through the game, your character gets access to a little moon buggy called the LOLA-RR10. It lets you drive around to new dungeons and find plot things.
Now, the LOLA-RR10's controls are... well, "highly imprecise" is the charitable way of putting it, but I figured that was intentional. It's a moon buggy, right? You shouldn't be able to stop on a dime or corner like a fiend in it. Basically, you control the LOLA-RR10 the same way you control your main character in Moon. That means you accelerate and corner with the D-Pad, and control the camera with the stylus. You also have a little gun you can fire with the L button.
Now, most racing games don't make the player futz with camera control because that is a completely terrible idea. Not only do you have to wrestle with the LOLA's unresponsiveness, but you also have to make sure you're angling the camera in such a way that your d-pad input will send you into the desired passage and not, say, into a wall or land mine. If you're trying to go fast, the stylus camera controls tend to inspire incredible motion sickness.
Now, about halfway through the game, there's a sequence where you have to take the LOLA to a satellite dish installation as part of the plot. You are given a two-minute timer in which to manage this. The area you're racing through is loaded with enemies, twisting passages, land mines, and dead ends. Yes, the game seriously expects you to deal with this crap while winning a two-minute moon buggy race.
It gets better! Halfway through the race, you find the goal marked on your mini-map is in fact only a checkpoint. Regardless of how well or poorly you were doing at that point in the game, Moon immediately autosaves your progress. Moon also only allows one savefile at a time, too, so if you can't win after the checkpoint auto-save, then guess what? You get to delete your data and play the entire first half of the game over again.
Now, as it happened, I'd read a vaguely-worded warning about the race shenanigans in a Destructoid review before I started playing Moon. When the sequence started, I immediately recognized that this must be the part of the game that could break your save and managed to bull through with relatively little trouble by making sure I got through the first half of the segment with about a minute left. If I hadn't been warned... well, this rant would be a lot angrier, I bet.
Still: why is this sequence even in the game? There's no way someone doing it for the first time, who hasn't been warned about the checkpoint, is going to actually hit the checkpoint with enough time to finish. More to the point, the sequence by itself isn't any fun, it's just something you put up with so you can get back to the nice polished FPS sequences.
As bad as Moon's save-breaking Mandatory Racing Sequence is, it's not actually the worst I've ever played. That dubious honor goes to Battletoads - otherwise an entirely memorable if not actually good 8-bit game - which has rapidly autoscrolling speederbike racing levels that are excruciatingly difficult to finish with two players (in a game that was heavily advertised as a great two-player successor to Double Dragon). A similar sequence involving "winger clingers" later on is literally impossible to finish with two players. Even solo, completing the racing levels involves an exquisitely hellish merger of twitch reflex and rote memorization. I did it, but I wasn't proud of myself for having done so.
While I rag on Mandatory Racing Sequences here, I will note that they don't have to be bad. When developers put a lot of care into polishing the race sequence up, or when they just have the good sense to make it none too obtrusive, then the race can be a pleasant break from other sorts of gameplay.
Final Fantasy VII, for instance, may have the most well-done Mandatory Racing Sequence of all time. You're only required to snowboard once and don't actually have to be any good at it-- since the skills demanding by snowboarding aren't exactly what the rest of the game demands. That said, there was enough meat to the snowboarding game that it was conceivable you'd want to go back and play it again just for fun. Square-Enix even managed to sell it as a stand-alone cel phone game in Japan.
That should be the gold standard for any Mandatory Racing Sequence: if it's not a snippet of gameplay that could be easily expanded and sold as a game by itself, just don't do it. And I seriously doubt Renegade Kid ever entertained the delusion that they might be able to sell a full LOLA-RR10 Moonbuggy Derby to anybody.
