Jewel Case Release
| Genre: Racing |
CDs: 1 |
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| Publisher: The Learning Company |
Released: November 15, 2000 |
| Developer: Runecraft, Ltd |
UPC: 7 72040 80322 3 |
| Sony ID: SLUS-01090 |
PSRM: 021030 |
| Players: 1 to 4 Players |
Memory: 1 Block |
| Accessories: Analog, Vibration |
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| ESRB: Everyone – Edutainment |
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| Box Copy:
Help Arthur build the ultimate race car! The big race is coming up, and Arthur and his friends are preparing for it. Arthur wants to build the ultimate racer, but he needs your help! Use critical thinking skills to solve puzzles at the Sugar Bowl and the Pet Shop. Collect Bionic Bunny cards that can be traded for cool new car accessories. Then enter the race and play alone or with friends. Play over and over again because the game changes each time you play!
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Variants
- There are no known variants.
Misprints
- There are no known misprints.
Review
With all the chaos from working on the Beavis & Butt-head prototype, I realized I just needed a break. I needed something stupidly simple to calm my brain down from all the excitement, so I picked the young children’s game Arthur! Ready to Race. As fate would have it, another adventure was about to begin.
Arthur himself is based on the children’s book series by Marc Brown, along with the cartoon show developed and released in 1996. Our title character is an anthropomorphic aardvark, living in the imaginary Elwood City.
Within the game, Arthur and his friends Francine and the Brain stumble upon blueprints to make a boxcar racer. After the opening sequences’ trial run, it’s determined that the ol’ junker isn’t going to cut it for the big leagues, and they’re going to need to get upgrades going. If anyone is going to win the Elwood City Soap Box Racing Championship, it’s going to be him.
It’s from here that the game’s main course is delivered, adventuring around Elwood City doing favors and tasks to earn the needed car parts, as well as some coins to razzle-dazzle the ol’ car. But there’s a tiny, dark secret looming in the shadows of Elwood City – Arthur’s quest can never be 100% completed. More on that as we go.
The city is divided into mini-games and, as the manual calls them, enrichment activities. The former finds Arthur performing tasks for his friends, from picking tomatoes to rescuing a backpack from the cemetery. Completing these adventures will score one 1/4th of the current boxcar he’s building.
In Muffy’s yard, Arthur will need to dodge skunks and porcupines to collect enough tomatoes to make paste. After that, it’s off to his own house to help his father retrieve stolen food from the family dog, Pal. This involves chasing the pet through the backwoods behind the house while collecting Bionic Bunny cards and coins. Once he’s back in the dog house, it’s off to the cemetery to rescue your friend’s backpack. Which he conveniently dropped, taking the shortcut through the cemetery.
Finally, it’s off to the library to help chase after your baby sister. Like the tomato garden, the library is set up as a mini-maze, with ladders and stacks of books blocking specific aisles. Catching up with the baby provides the 4th and final piece to the boxcar.
Once the last piece is in place, the game automatically sends you to the next race. Here, Arthur must make it to the finish line before time runs out. Successfully winning the course will trigger the final building phase, creating the ultimate Supersonic racer. This entails repeating the same 4 mini-games already performed, but with slightly more obstacles in your path. There will be more piles of leaves and ghosts in the cemetery. Tomatoes will fall off the bushes before you can grab them, and more.
Between the car part scavenger hunts, Arthur can participate in some side adventures to earn some extra coins for the toy shop. The shop holds new paint colors for the car, as well as accessories like a horn and pennant flags. Two locations are ripe for money-making – the post office and the pet shop. In both cases, either a package or a pet has gone missing, and if Arthur is successful in locating and retrieving them, 5 coins can be had for each successful trip.
There’s the famous hangout Sugar Bowl, but here it’s relegated to just being the game’s music player. Allowing you to collect music CDs and then listen to them here. Leaving the cafe will also change the world music to whatever the last CD was.
There’s the Joke Shop, which does nothing but offer you one of a handful of knock-knock jokes. Some are decent, some are…not, but it’s a cute time waster in between errands and quests.
As hinted earlier, besides collecting coins, Arthur can collect Bionic Bunny cards in his travels. There are 256 of them to find, and outside of a single pesky card, they’re relatively easy to track down. Any cards that are missed in a mini-game can be acquired by replaying the mini-game. If done so, and the mini-game is completed, you’ll earn another 5 coins rather than the car parts.
The cards are easy, and there’s plenty of gameplay to earn enough coins to buy out the shop. But it’s collectable music CDs that are the dark horse here. According to the game’s memory card screen, there are a possible 12 music CDs to gather. Each mini game has one, and since you do each of them twice, that’s the first eight discs. They give you one to start, as that’s the default ambient city music, which brings us to 9. You find one in the practice race, and the final one in the championship race, bringing us to 11 out of 12.
So where’s number 12? Forever lost in the coding. The obvious place should be in the 2nd race, where you qualify after building the red box car. But it’s not there at all. I ran through the game 5 times, in different ways, and nothing makes the disc appear. After consulting with the fantastic Bo from Rings of Saturn and his reverse engineering skills, and my GameShark musings, it was discovered that nothing sets the register for the disc’s slot in memory.
For those that don’t know, most of the time, when an item is picked up, it triggers an on/off setting in memory. 00 means you don’t have it, 01 means you do. We were able to pinpoint the exact section of memory tracking the discs, coins, and cards. Our missing disc is here in slot 2. Oddly enough, if you hack the number of discs Arthur has, the game properly sets the missing status. So far, this is the only way to achieve 100% completion in the game – using a GameShark.
But here’s the bigger problem. In a situation like this, you’d likely consider the game to be rated “Broken”, like Largo Winch…except, it’s not. In one of the most bizarre instances of sidequesting, having 100% completion doesn’t unlock anything. Absolutely nothing – while the CDs allow for music, and the coins purchase items, having all of them with the 256 Bionic Bunny cards provides no reward to the user. So it really doesn’t matter.
Having completed the quest via the GameShark, I can safely say I’ve seen everything there is to see. And with that, we can get to the review part.
Over the years, the game’s livelihood has been shredded by reviewers. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a life-changing video game, but I feel like most people who review them forget that sometimes it’s not about their point of view. In Arthur’s case, this was intended for younger children. The game’s activities all hide lessons to be learned without explicitly saying so.
Collecting the coins teaches financial responsibility, especially when seen through the eyes of performing the post office and pet shop tasks. Collecting the cards teaches patience, and allowing players to replay stages shows that tasks can be completed, even if they take a while.
Each of the 4 mini-games illustrates just how far simply helping someone can take you. In this case, building a winning boxcar.
Another nice little feature, though annoying at first, is that the entire game is spoken to the player. You don’t need to know how to read, as Arthur verbally walks you through each process, including loading and saving data. It’s charming, and I think it helps little ones avoid frustrations with the activities. There’s also no gas button. The game scrolls automatically, getting faster with each car. The only controls to worry about are braking and steering.
The game’s graphics look wonderful. Leaves result as you run past them; the locations all have these neat touches to them, like the light-up displays in the library and the branching paths behind Arthur’s house. Pal’s animation is freaking adorable, and there’s enough to do around town to keep little ones entertained. More importantly, the game can be completed in about 40 minutes if they’re trying for everything.
Despite the constantly negative reviews over the years, Arthur! Ready to Race has the heart to satisfy its core audience. You know, kids. It’s a decent way to spend an afternoon, and while it’ll never be in someone’s permanent library, it at least deserves a once-around-the-block.
On the PlayStationLibrary review scale, it’s a ‘Good’ 6 out of 10.
The Good
- Super easy to pick up and play
- Teaches kids to help others
- Delightful graphics
The Bad
- Can’t 100% the collectibles
- The game doesn’t allow enjoyment of the collectibles
- Adults will find the voice-overs annoying
Final Score: 6/10 – Good
Arthur! Ready to Race isn’t going to be on anyone’s Top 100 charts, but as a way to waste an hour teaching small kids something, it works out pretty well.
Screenshots
Videos
A full video review of the game.
Trivia
- Based on the cartoon show of the same name.
- There are only 3 races in the game – the starting race, the Phase II qualifying race, and the Phase III final race. The rest of the game involves playing mini-games to acquire the car parts.
- The post office and pet shop are completely optional events. The missing pets and packages will not appear until you walk into the shops for the first time. The pets and packages appear randomly around the area, one at a time for each one.
- Multi-player is still done one player at a time. Each person races the track, collecting items and scoring the best time.
- There appears to be a missing item – the last Music CD to collect. It should be on the second racetrack, but it never appears.
- Inside the post office, the cash register reads “0069”. Nice.
- Based on text found in the game’s memories. There were several paint colors and racecar accessories not used. Or worse, affected by the missing 12th CD glitch. The colors are orange and yellow.
- As with the missing paint, there’s also the potential for missing racecar items. Text for streamers and a safety flag can be found, but never offered.
- After watching the demo several times, it appears to be a 3-clip suite that plays forward in progress, and then backwards to the original starting choice. In order, it’s Arthur, Brain, and Buster. No sign of the 4th playable character, the female friend.
- The Cutting Room Floor found voice samples that show 3 of the mini-game friends could have been racers.
- The race track is treated like Ridge Racer’s. Each race is technically the same track; they just close off forks in the road to open other ones. Hay bundles act as the wall.
Guide
A simple guide for the game can be found here. It covers the entire game, with all side quests.