(Review) Mickey’s Speedway U.S.A. for the Nintendo 64

Two of the things most synonymous with the Nintendo 64 are: Kart Racing games, and games developed by the studio Rareware. Mario Kart 64 was the first Nintendo 64 game released that took advantage of the consoles four controller ports, offering a unique way to play the Kart racing genre. Rareware saw Mario Kart 64’s success and decided to take a crack at the proven-solid formula of “Kart racing with the whole gang”. Releasing at the tail end of 1997, Rareware brought us Diddy Kong Racing which proved to also be a giant success. While (almost) every game that Rare made on the Nintendo 64 was a certified classic, there is one game that everyone forgets about when discussing the studios iconic string of releases. People will look at you sideways if you say “no, the other N64 Kart Racer by Rare”, because almost everyone has forgotten about 2000’s Mickey’s Speedway USA. The late-stage N64 release was Rareware’s Swan song for the very console that made them a household name. Mickey’s Speedway USA was an underwhelming game that was just a few tweaks away from being a title that people don’t need to be reminded of.

The plot shouldn’t have gone beyond this point, but oh well let’s race.

Mickey’s Speedway USA is a Disney-themed kart Racer produced by Rareware and released on November 13th, 2000. You have your options to play as the usual Disney suspects: The Mouse himself, Minnie, Goofy, Donald, Daisy even longtime frenemy Pete joins the race with other racers being unlocked as the game progresses. The game has a very simple plot: Those pesky Weasels are back, and they’ve stolen Pluto because they’ve had their eyes set on Pluto’s Diamond encrusted collar. Like all bad criminals, the Weasels decide to be very upfront about their crimes by sending Mickey and the gang postcards of everywhere in the United States they’ve been since stealing the dog. Seriously, these Weasels aren’t bright…not once did the Weasels realize that dog collars are in fact removeable from the dog wearing them. Mickey’s friend Prof. Drake decides to lend the gang a hand by building high speed go karts for them, so they can chase the Weasels down and rescue Pluto.

Though this games plot is silly and easy to ignore, this games graphics and performance are very impressive for the genre and for the n64 in general. Racing games on the N64 tend to suffer from graphical pop-in and fog when dealing with the technical demands of a racing game, but this game manages to give the illusion of high-speed racing while still having very detailed worlds and backgrounds that don’t feature the cursed n64 fog. The game play itself is very smooth, with a constant frame rate and an amazing sense of speed when racing at higher difficulties. At no point in Mario Kart 64 or Diddy Kong racing do the speeds feel as fast as in Mickey’s Speedway USA.  The controls in this game are just as smooth and standard as you could want in a Kart Racer. This game features a drift mechanic that is pretty solid in concept but almost none of the maps have areas where you’ll benefit from drifting, so it feels pretty pointless to include. Though the game looks good and performs super well, its technical performance does feel like a bit of a waste on a game that would instantly be perceived as “For kids”. Even though this game is very technically impressive, that’s about where the games praise ends.

Mickey’s Speedway USA’s single player offerings are fairly run of the mill for kart racers. The story mode features 16 initial tracks broken in to four tournaments. Each tournament has three different speed classes to go for gold in. There is also a time trial mode available, in which you can practice at any speed on whatever tracks you have unlocked. While the slowest race class is great for getting used to track layouts, it’s a bit boring as you’ll smoke the competition without any effort. The middle class is perfect for this game as competition ramps up and the speed finally gets to a very exciting but manageable pace. You can really feel the jump from “Beginner” to “Intermediate”. Unfortunately, the game becomes very messy at the highest speed. Rare didn’t do a great job at balancing the speed classes with the level designs, so playing at the highest speed can be a real mess on some tracks. It feels like certain tracks were only optimized for certain speed classes which can leave you feeling like your racer is almost incompatible with the area. If you’re playing at the highest speed, the game will have you moving so fast in some levels that you’ll have finished the race in 60 seconds or less. It feels like the later more challenging maps are simply there to say “screw you” at the highest speed with the way that the hazards are laid out. Sure, in racing games you can always memorize a maps layout and respond accordingly, but that’s not good enough with later maps as the environment start to become unpredictable with falling debris and narrow bridges that are easy to get knocked off of. There’s no strategy or sweet spot with the obstacles besides crossing fingers and hoping you make it to the other side unscathed. The hardest maps are unlockable but also necessary to progress the single player story.

good luck finding these

The problem with the unlockable late tracks is that neither the game nor the game’s instruction manual tells you that you were supposed to be looking for collectibles the whole time to unlock these last four maps. If you want to see the end of the game, you need to collect four different race car parts that are scattered throughout the game’s 16 maps. I had to dig around the internet to find out how to progress further in the single player, and almost every source of info with a comment section had the same type of message: “thanks, I gave up because I couldn’t figure this out as a child”  or “I didn’t know that you had to do this” This is not the kind of racer that encourages exploration, as there really isn’t much in the way of shortcuts to be found, so it’s very frustrating that when the game expects you to somehow know that you should be driving around in search of trinkets. Instead of the game dropping clues, you just have to stumble upon these very well-hidden objects and then the game is like “Oh, right! You found it, by the way you need more of those”. The combination of having the vaguest chance of finding the essential hidden tracks with the “Screw you” mentality of the late game really ends up ruining what little good grace and charm has been built up to that point in the game’s single player mode.

Chicago, known for it’s world famous wall snot

The Level design is bland and uninspired, as most of the locations are named after major U.S. cities but don’t feature much in the way of showing you that you’re in that area. For example, the Chicago level is just a series of sewers where you don’t see any skyline or landmarks or even a sign that says “Chicago”, you’re just to assume that the sewage underneath your tires belongs to Chicago. If levels do have some sort of landmark, it only ever feels like an afterthought that was slapped on for the sake of easy recognition. The San Francisco level could’ve easily been “New Haven, Connecticut” if it weren’t for the Golden Gate bridge that can be seen for a few seconds. In the Grand Canyon track, you just drive around in some caves and generic mountain terrain but there’s nothing about it that says “Woah, it’s the Grand Canyon!” None of the levels feel like they belong in a Disney game, as they’re just vaguely cartoonish without that Disney spark. For example, the first course in the game takes place in Indianapolis at a racetrack featuring billboards and signs on the walls surrounding the track. With a whole race stadium full of signs and billboards, you’d expect the game to make cute little in-universe references to fake sponsorships like “Mickeys Motor Oil” or “Goofy’s Grub” but no, they take the most generic approach by having signs that say “Win” “go”  or even “Racer” and a slightly different “Racing”. Rareware didn’t even give themselves an easy logo cameo in this racetrack, which is odd considering that they were somewhat notorious for self-inserts at this point. If I didn’t know any better, I would have just assumed that these generic signs were the result of poor translation or localization, but Rareware are a British company and Disney is American: English is the native language for these two companies. The biggest problem with the environments is that you could easily drop another cartoon franchise in these tracks, and it’d all fit together without any evidence that the world was inhabited by Mickey and his pals. Though the level designs themselves are uninspired, they still manage to be easy on the eyes as none of them feature overly contrasted colors like Rareware’s other Kart racer is guilty of. The tracks are boring, but they do come at you fast and at a reliable, consistent frame rate.  This game manages to have multiple tracks set in California and one in Florida, yet the Disney theme parks aren’t playable or even hinted at via easter egg. Why wouldn’t they include the most obvious level choices? There’s even an elephant in the room for one of the multiplayer maps.

The multiplayer offerings for this game are decent but standard for the genre and time. You and up to three others can race each other on any of the single-player tracks or you can battle each other in “contest” mode. Contest mode is exactly what you’re expecting, flat maps where you shoot powerups at balloons on your enemy’s kart. Each balloon left on the kart counts a life, and you’re out if you have no more balloons to pop. I do like that they at least made the 3 balloons into a mickey head instead of just 3 regular shaped balloons…this is the attention to detail that the game deserved. Contest mode features two very bad maps, and two maps that aren’t too bad but aren’t exactly a blast to play. What makes two of the maps bad is that they’re just open squares that reuse assets from other single player levels. The “dockyard” map is alright, it’s still an open box but it’s got different levels and as structure to climb in the middle so you can at least have some sort of strategy beyond “Go in circle”. The other not-so-bad contest mode map is a steamboat…with Mickey characters on it…but it’s not Steamboat Willie. What makes this map decent is that it’s not just a box but takes place mostly on the outer deck of a steamboat. Frustratingly enough, the steamboat isn’t even located on the Mississippi river in this game, which is most associated with steamboats in the United States. The steamboat featured in this game says nothing that hints at Mickey’s first cartoon, which just feels so not Disney. This steamboat level manages to fail at applying both the Disney theme and United States theme. I don’t understand how this game can keep rubbing up against such obvious level choices without making it happen. No Disney land, no Disney world, and only generic steamboats? Disney and Rareware are better than this.

Steamboat Willie

Powerup choices are just as uninspired as the level designs are but do offer a surprising amount of cartoon violence for a Mickey product.  The powerups are all ripped off from Mario Kart while somehow not managing to impact the game in the same way that Mario Kart’s powerups would. I like the idea of some of the powerups in MSUSA, but I dislike the nearly useless implementation of them in this game. Almost no race outcome will change based on someone getting a powerup at the right time. Some of the MK powerup “substitutions” are cool ideas: exploding baseballs replace the green shells while an RC airplane replaces the Red shells, which is the surprisingly more violent choice. I’m not even sure that the enemy AI knows how to use powerups in this game, as you only tend to hear the sound effects of the powerups without laying eyes on them. Once again, the games speed acts against itself when it comes to powerups because you’ll either be too far away from your opponents to use the powerups, or your powerup will get interrupted by a wall before reaching a targeted racer ahead of you. The game offers a pretty good drifting feature that you’ll almost never need to use as the level designs don’t really encourage you to drift around corners. There is almost no benefit to drifting in this game, so it’s a bit useless of a feature to have despite it being available.

The game’s audio is a mixed bag in the sense that is of good compositional quality, but not up to the usual Rareware standard of excellence. I expect at least one or two earworms from the Rareware of this time, and that was not the case with this soundtrack. The soundtrack features a heavy emphasis on brass instruments and funky basslines, with an overall cartoon vibe that manages to blend in a unique way. Unfortunately, the soundtrack is a little forgettable despite being pleasing to the ear as there is no one song that really sticks with you. Rareware managed to get the actual voice cast for the Mickey characters, but also made the mistake of having computer drivers spam the same two or three lines of dialogue during game play. The computer racers talk every time one of the drivers falls behind or gains a position…so almost every second of audio is filled with generic excitement and disappointment from the Mickey crew “Oh yes!” “Why I never!!” “Oh boy!”  is all you’ll hear on loop while the course sounds and music struggle to be heard in the background. It’s almost as if the games AI thinks that the goal of the game is “who can be the loudest?”. Thankfully, the in-game options allow you to turn the character voice lines off, because it’s extremely irritating to hear all of them compete for your TV’s speaker. None of the audio comes across as poor quality or doesn’t seem to be “fuzzy” from compression like other games on the system, which continues in this games tradition of “Technically sound but still boring”.

This game could’ve been great if they leaned more into the Disney theming and spent more time refining the balance between speed and level design. The middle section of the game’s single player is actually very fun and enjoyable, but it quickly gets stale as you will need to traverse generic environments at too-fast of speeds to progress further. This game doesn’t attempt to strike a balance between difficulties which isn’t very fair or fun in a game that’s mostly meant for kids. I’d recommend this game only if you’re tired of the big two kart racers on the system, but still want to stay racing on the same system. While Mickey’s Speedway USA is fun for a few hours, it is ultimately a very forgettable experience. The hard pill to swallow with this game is knowing that it came from such a prestigious studio but still managed to be less-than. It’s not like Rareware didn’t have experience making kart racers on the system, as they made a far better kart racer about 5 years earlier. Disney and Rareware should’ve been a collaboration that changed gaming, but instead we’re left with a weekend rental that you’ll be bored of by Sunday. Disney usually brings a certain level of charm to their games with their brand presence alone, and Rareware was on fire with their own brand of gaming this time yet neither of the two seemed to have put forward their best. This game should’ve been an easy instant classic but instead it just feels like a soulless exchange of assets between two companies. Everything is technically sound but very boring, which makes for a disappointing experience. This game would have been better off without the Disney license, as it doesn’t really take advantage of it in any creative ways. Hot Dog! Mickey’s Speedway USA gets a score of C for being a mediocre kart racer with an above average technical performance.

Technically sound but an underwhelming effort from the N64 Powerhouse, Rare.