Actually, that's not what I'm here to talk about. Instead, I'm going to talk about Mastertronic's classic Commodore 64 game, Kikstart 2.
Brmmm, brmmm, look at me go! Oh, wait... is that you finishing?
But why, you might be asking, am I not going to talk about the first Kikstart game? Well, to be honest, I hated it. I played it a few times, and I was absolutely sick of seeing my rider lie flat and fall to the ground with that "Weeeeooooooooo" noise. SO. IRRITATING!
For some reason, though, I gave Kikstart 2 a good go, and I did actually get into it. It was like Dropzone for me, in that regard, in that I repeatedly went back to a game that routinely kicked my arse and eventually got the better of it.
Fire + bike full of fuel = not finishing the race.
Kikstart 2, then, is a motorbike trials game. You're given a multitude of courses to choose from, and you must select five to race over, Your times are added together at the end, and the competitor with the fastest combined time wins.
Sounds simple, but it is a trials game as well as a race game, which means that setting any kind of competitive time is far from straightforward. You can't just zoom across every obstacle at top speed. You have to figure each one out and take it appropriately, whether that's by wheeling, jumping, or going fast or slow. It's not just a trial, it's trial-and-error.
You shouldn't lose your head when racing.
Once you learn how to take each obstacle, you can focus on putting some decent times on the board. But with twenty-four courses to blunder through, there's a lot of learning and falling to be done. Even if you manage to master them all, there's a contruction kit for unlimited kikstarting. And of course, there's the split-screen two-player mode for added fun.
The Kikstart games paved the way for tons of other games, right up to current daddies like Trials HD. I have to say, I absolutely hate Trials. I couldn't even get past the tutorial in it. I find all those games to be too much like puzzle games, rather than racers. That makes it all the stranger that I like Kikstart 2. It was a great game then, and it hasn't really lost anything in all these years.
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