Date Released: 28 November 1994
Date Played: 31 October 2019
Checkered Flag is a racing game developed by Rebellion Developments and published by Atari. It was originally released as a handheld game for the Atari Lynx in 1991 where it was met with praise by critics and gamers alike. Three years later, the game was remade for the commercially disastrous Jaguar game console. This time around, the game is a woefully bad 3D polygonal racer that was blatantly trying to rip off the Virtua Racing aesthetic instead of sticking to the 2D sprite based visuals that were common during that time period. Even today, many of those chunky polygon looking racers can have a sort of charming appeal to them that seems to have that retro-trendy vibe that's cool again. The aforementioned Virtual Racing is a still a classic as is Hard Drivin' and Stunt Racers as well. Luckily, Checkered Flag, while very primitive looking by today's standards still holds up in a very nostalgic sort of way and falls right in with those other games in terms of its visuals. The sky, in particular, seems to be digitized pictures of actual clouds that had been photographed. It clashes with the polygons of the gameplay in a wonderful and silly way that is so characteristic of 90s games that were trying to push for anything resembling photorealism.
Unfortunately, outside of the visuals, the gameplay doesn't hold up quite as well. There are three modes to the game to choose from. Exhibition, where you can select you track, weather, number of laps, number of racers, and the color of your car (they are all identical) for a single race, Free Practice, where you do the same but without any opponents, and finally Tournament mode where you try to come in 1st place against 5 other racers over 10 different races of 10 laps each. It's an OK amount of content and is certainly par of the course for this time period. The tracks are all very basic and are set in boring locations that don't do a good job of being memorable in any meaningful way and all start to blur together in your mind after only a couple of runs through the game. You have several different camera angles to view things, but as we've all learned by now, most of them are more cinematic and basically pointless for actually attempting to drive. Remember when having a bunch of crazy camera angels was a selling point of a game? My, how times have changed.
Where the game really falters in an unforgivable way is in the control department. Checkered Flag performs extremely poorly and runs at around 10 frames per second. It's so choppy and disorienting that it's almost impossible to control your car or even tell what is going on. The action is simply too fast for such a low framerate and you'll find yourself constantly careening all over the track as you crash over and over again. This enormous problem is only made worse by the abysmally poor handling of the cars. If you hold down the left or right directional buttons for more than a fraction of a second, your car attempts to make a 90 degree turn and smashes into the wall. As much as I tried, I just couldn't get the hang of controlling the cars in any sort intuitive way. The only way to play effectively that I could figure out was to tap the directional buttons constantly. Unfortunately, this doesn't allow the car to make turns fast enough to deal with any of the maneuvers that are required of you. If you try to hold down the button, you'll oversteer and crash once again. So, you end up doing a tap, tap, hold, hold, tap, hold sort of pattern that works well enough but makes the game far too labor intensive to be enjoyable and feels like real chore. Your thumb will be cursing you the entire time it's having to deal with the less than stellar directional pad of the Jaguar controller.
Despite not being able to see what I'm doing, not being able to steer, and constantly crashing, I was able to complete all tracks in the game, come in 1st place on most, and even set the track record a number of times. So, not only do you have a completely frustrating experience, it doesn't even pack a challenge to keep you coming back. So, this just leaves us with a game that's a ripoff of Virtual Racing, doesn't look as good, performs much worse, and isn't nearly as fun to play. I guess if you were one of the sad few that only had an Atari Jaguar to play back in the mid 90s, then this was your only real option for a game like this... and believe me when I say that I can empathize with you over that struggle.
Today, Checkered flag is one of the most affordable games on the Atari Jaguar; and in a time where retro game prices are shooting through the roof, this is one of the few that are still relatively obtainable. But, heed my advice, unless you're aiming for a complete Atari Jaguar collection, don't bother picking up this one. After an hour, you'll have seen all the content that it has to offer and the buyer's remorse will be palpable.
Final Status: Completed
Final Score: 2/10 (almost unplayable by today's standards)
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