Homie Rollerz
| This article was copied (instead of imported) from the now-deleted Crappy Games Wiki. |
| Homie Rollerz | ||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Nintendo officially abandoned quality control when they allowed a racist game to be released on their console.
| ||||||||||||||
|
Homie Rollerz is a 2008 kart racing game developed by Webfoot Technologies and published by Destineer for the Nintendo DS. The game is based on the plastic figurine line Homies by American cartoonist David Gonzales and follows ten different characters from the figurine line racing each other in a competition set up by an elderly man named Vato Wizard, who has the ability to grant wishes.
Homie Rollerz was received generally negatively by critics and has been one of the lowest-rated games on review aggregator Metacritic. The game was criticized for its difficulty and have described the game as having poor game design and derivative content.
Gameplay
Homie Rollerz is a kart racing game where the player plays as one of ten different selectable Homies characters in several racetracks, based on the Homies universe. Each character has a unique vehicle, with further customization options being purchasable with "respect points", the game's currency, obtained by performing tricks and winning races.
The game's main mode is called Wizard Circuit, where the different Homies characters race in a competition set up by Vato Wizard, who promises to grant a single wish to whoever wins the cup. To progress through the mode, players must place first in a series of races. The game also has a multiplayer mode that supports up to eight players via a local wireless connection, although multiplayer with up to four players was also possible with the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection.
Development and Release
Homie Rollerz was developed by American video game developer Webfoot Technologies, in partnership with cartoonist David Gonzales. In an interview with Destructoid, Gonzales stated that he had been attempting for years to find a publisher with faith in the idea of a video game based on the Homies figurine line. Eventually, Gonzales found Destineer, with who he would begin working with shortly thereafter.
Homie Rollerz was first showcased at PAX 2007, along with a playable early version of the game. The game was initially intended to release in fall of 2007, although it was delayed until January 2008, then delayed again till February 27, and then delayed again to March 5. The game released exclusively in the United States.
Why It's Not Our Homie
- It's one of the many obvious rip-offs of Mario Kart, like M&M's Kart Racing. The gameplay tries to be exactly like said game, but since it's actually a bad game in the first place, it already failed horribly at replicating Mario Kart.
- The graphics are so bad that they even give London Cab Challenge a run for its money, with models that look extremely blocky and textures of very bad quality, which is reminiscent to a Sega 32X game, which that platform came out 13 years before the game even came out.
- Low framerate that does not go above 30 FPS, which is unacceptable for the Nintendo DS, since it's already capable of running a lot of games in 60 FPS. Never mind the fact that this was on a game of the seventh generation, which is 2 generations ahead of the fifth one which caused the great transition from 2D to 3D gaming, but most of the games only ran at 30 FPS due to hardware limitations.
- Fourth generation-quality sounds and soundtrack, including a horrendous kart engine noise that sounds exactly like that on Hard Drivin'.
- The game has offensive portrayals of Latino stereotypes as it contains frequent racial slurs in an E-rated game, which is outrageous since it is completely unethical for children to play a game with outright offensive material! This even proved that video game regulation organizations often don't rate games properly and probably do not even play games before rating them, which had recently been exposed in the gaming community and caused major backlash to the companies responsible for wrong age ratings in video games.
- The control is pretty much uncontrollable, because the kart easily loses its control when it keeps bouncing when driving on slopes or colliding with certain walls because of how unrealistic the physics are. The kart also turns super tight that it might cause the camera to move very fast, more about it right below.
- A crazy camera that jerks around whenever you turn, which also turns so fast that you can barely notice that a wall might be approaching to you and cause you to crash into it because it requires so fast reaction times. It doesn't help that the maneuverability is strange, and you can turn so tight that you might cause the camera to turn around very fast. Sometimes, it especially messes up when you crash into certain obstacles, completely disorienting you thereafter.
- If you crash into an obstacle, which happens very often because of how bad the controls are, it is very hard to turn the kart around to continue driving, so you might pretty much lose the race.
- Putrid track design, which is made with the least amount of effort possible. There are many impossible sections that can lead to frequent crashes like mentioned above and they are full of soulless linear design.
- While it's usual to have several characters and vehicles in a racing game, almost all characters play in the same way with barely noticeable differences with their statistics and controls. Yes, the key part of racing games, which are racer statistics, are absent, which means that no matter which character and kart you select, you will always have the same statistics and therefore play the same way as all the other players.
- Pathetic number of characters, karts and tracks, even for a DS game. Only 10 characters are available including 2 unlockables, and while it's the same number of starter characters as in Mario Kart DS and Mario Kart 7, there are much less unlockable characters in Homie Rollerz than both games.
- Overpriced: The game costs $9 on retail, which is unacceptable for a game that suffers from a lack of content.
- Bad animated trailer shown below, only using budget figurines with terrible stop-motion animation and no facial animation whatsoever, and it barely even talks about the gameplay at all. The only vehicles shown in the trailer is a police car, a red one and a white one (displayed on the background door's mirrors), which does not make sense for a trailer of a racing game.
Reception
The game was critically panned by critics, especially because of its xenophobic and offensive depiction of Latin people, poor controls and graphics, shallow gameplay and terrible camera. It received a score of 23/100 on Metacritic, based on 10 reviews. IGN rated the game as "Painful" by giving it a score of 2/10.
In his review, TodoNintendoS went as far as to claim that it's the environment that is moving instead of the karts because of the bad camera, which is what made the controls insanely difficult. He ranked the game #7 in his YouTube video titled Top 10 Worst Nintendo DS Games.
Videos
Comments
[[]]