Rollcage
Description official descriptions
Rollcage is a fast, furious 3D racing game from Psygnosis, combining elements from Death Rally with elements from Bullfrog's classic Hi Octane: Race five other drivers in an immersive 3D environment while shooting at your peers and avoiding their retaliation.
You have a wide selection of tracks and cars, along with options for multiplayer gaming and a vast array of configuration options. Cars can drive up walls, flip over, and continue driving. This makes for a very quick and fluid gameplay unlike any other at the time of this game's release.
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Credits (Windows version)
12 People
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Reviews
Critics
Average score: 79% (based on 35 ratings)
Players
Average score: 3.5 out of 5 (based on 28 ratings with 1 reviews)
The Good
Rollcage has a fair share of goodness about it, starting with the wonderful eye-candy: Rollcage has, without a shadow of a doubt, the best 3D engine in a racing game ever, and one of the prettiest engines regardless. Amazing explosions, shadows, effects and everything you can ever hope for in a wonderfully immersive 3D environment. You can't beat that.
Also, add the amazing sound engine -- Rollcage adds to its visual splendour the single best sound engine ever experienced in a racing game. Even in software mode (a la Sensaura's QSound engine), Rollcage excells, with spectacular 3D sound and a greatly enhanced aureal experience via wonderfully executed doppler effects. Rollcage provides the most immersive and enveloping sound engine in a racing game yet. I only wish it would support A3D 2.0...
Rollcage has a vast array of levels. Expertly designed and implemented, these levels provide for hours and hours of furious gameplay, and there's even a bizarre arctic level to which you can scream at your brother: "Hey stupid, you're such a bad driver you actually drove right into a submarine!"
Also, with a vast number of configuration options, almost anything is customizable in Rollcage! Wooohee!
The Bad
Just a couple of complaints:
- Two or three of the levels are really, really annoying. But with so many to choose from, who cares?
- The controls are way too sensitive, which leaves you with only two cars with reasonable road grip (Jet and Leon). Anything else will send you spiralling towards the nearest wall.
The Bottom Line
A really wonderful racing game, combining the best elements of Hi Octane with a few touches of Death Rally. Obviously we've come a long way since the classic Death Track!
Windows · by Tomer Gabel (4539) · 2000
Trivia
Making Of
According to David Perryman, then a level designer at the Attention To Detail studio, the game's origins come from one of the studio's regular game pitching evenings. Steve Bennett had invented a new method of pushing polygons through the PlayStation at a ludicrously fast speed. Together with Stuart Tilley they pitched that technology as a racing game with destruction in it. They called it "Wrecked on Speed" and at that point it consisted only fast cars with a ton of downforce able to drive on walls and blow stuff up. After a period of pitching the game to publishers under the name "G-FX" (G-Force Extreme), the team was signed up by Psygnosis and the game was renamed "Rollcage" - a suggestion from Alan Bunker, head producer at Psygnosis Stroud.
During the development process, programmers encountered the problem with some cumbersome and clunky behaviour of the cars' objects when they exited a tunnel while driving on the wall. The solution was to rotate the object and, together with the toy of the Ricochet remote control car that flips over when colliding with wall which was brought to studio by John Meegan (external producer at Psygnosis), the idea of the shape of the cars was born. It was a compromise between the solution to the technical problem, and the lack of any real idea as to how the cars should look like.
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Wikipedia: Rollcage
Information about Rollcage at Wikipedia
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Contributors to this Entry
Game added by Tomer Gabel.
PlayStation added by Grant McLellan.
Additional contributors: DreinIX, mailmanppa.
Game added March 20th, 2000. Last modified December 3rd, 2023.