Error 404 Not Found rates this game: 5/5Rollcage is a futuristic racing game in which you can race your indestructable flippable car along walls and on ceilings due to the unique physics engine that drives the game. The vehicle you drive in the game has a small body and big wheels which enables you to drive the car any way up which leads to some nice graphical transitions and some disorientating ones but it's all good fun. It is a lot of fun spinning through the air having driven off the edge of an upward slope at full speed. Although it can be frustrating if it was unintended and it slows you down due to a bad landing (landing facing the wrong way etc). There is help when you're first starting out though. There's an auto correct button during the easy stage, which automaticly positions you to face the right direction.
It is essentially a combat racer, so you have a multitude of weapons at your disposal some of which you can use tacticly as well as aggressively. The weapons are dropped onto the track by little crafts and you pick them up as you race. You can carry two weapons at a time.
The weapons available are as follows:
1. Homing Missile: Doesn't lock onto other drivers as you might expect, but locks onto weakpoints of buildings, and over head signs allowing you to bring them down on top of following racers. If timed correctly you can also use a resultant explosion to give you a boost / kick up the ass when coming off a jump, or you can use them to stop leader missiles.
2. Driller: The driller is three missiles which fire straight ahead and they corkscrew into each other as they move forward. They will send a rival flying into the air if hit. You can also use these missiles to destroy buildings/structures, or stop the leader missile. You can only fire it straight though
3. Time Warp: Time warp slows down all the other racers while maintain your normal speed allowing you to catch up or get further ahead.
4. Ice sheet: You emit electrical ice from your vehicle causing surrounding vehicles to lose grip and slide around as if on an icey surface.
5. Turbo: Turbo is exactly what it sounds like. It gives you a nice and abrupt speed boost. If you have a vibrating pad it gives you a nice jolt. It's also very pleasing graphicly, especially with the motion blur on.
6. Leader Missile: The leader missile is an intelligent missile that seeks the racer in first place. When you are targetted by it you will hear an intermittent beeping which gets faster as it gets closer.
7. Wormhole: You fire the wormhole at rivals ahead of you. If it is not destroyed by missiles etc. they will be drawn through it and rematerialise positioned behind you.
8. Shield: Although your vehicle is indestructable a direct hit with a driller will send you flying into the air... unless you have a shield. The shield also provides defense against the infamous leader missile and falling or fallen debris from destroyed buildings or structures. It will fade eventually if you take too many hits... I think you're able to take three direct hits before the shield eventually fades.
I think that Rollcage is one of those games that gets overlooked. I haven't met many people who've played it or even heard about it, and yet it had some great graphics and some of the most unique gameplay of many other games out at the time. I haven't seen much like it since either. There is always Rollcage: Stage II (PSX)(More tracks, different scoring system, big jumps, even faster), and a game I found out about recently called Firebugs (PSX), which I haven't played but it might be worth looking into ;)
I'll put it in the "Suggest an emulator" section later, but I just thought I would say I haven't had good results trying to play this on ePSXe (lack of sound on menus, and more importantly - a cloudly blue screen during gameplay where only some of the lighting effects are partially visible / basicly unplayable, this might be due to any number of things like my graphics card, the plugins i'm using__pretty sure I've tried a few different ones with it.), but I've had pretty good results from psX1.13 (Looks decent, all the sound is there, good times :D) <-- This is all just in my experience, but just so you know :)
