Yahoo Autos Hooters Road Trip Was the World's Worst Racing Game
I love racing games with a passion. I’ve been reviewing and obsessing over them for decades. While it’s fun to glorify all the greats – your Gran Turismos and your Forzas and your Project Gothams – to really appreciate how far we’ve come, I think it’s important to sometimes look at the stars that shine a little less bright. Or, in this case, to occasionally gaze into the heart of a black hole so dark you may be driven to hang up your controllers forever.
Prepare yourself, because today we’re looking at a game that made few waves when released for the original PlayStation in 2002 and should have been long-since forgotten. But I remember, dear readers, and I think it’s time that you join me in experiencing what is one of the worst racing games of all time: Hooters Road Trip.
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It starts, of course, with America’s most shameful chain restaurant. (I promise I won’t dwell on the inexplicable success of a franchise that runs on a perplexing ability to convince men that A: the wings are worth the embarrassment, and B: the servers are interested in you, and not your tip money. They aren’t, and they aren’t.)
Now, think of Hooters Road Trip as something like the ultra-tacky cousin of Cruis’n USA. You’re competing in a country-spanning race, driving one of 16 generic, unlicensed cars and trucks, racing against a fleet of similarly anonymous entrants in one point-to-point event after another. Place well on an individual stage and you’ll continue on to the next, with your cumulative ranking determining whether you’ve won.
Really, though, there are no winners here.
Finish one set of stages and you’ll unlock another, including compelling routes like Ft. Lauderdale to Jacksonville to Raleigh and then... back to Jacksonville. There’s a lot of back-tracking here, running courses in reverse because doing that was surely a lot easier for the game developers than actually designing new courses.
If you finish near the top on enough segments, you’ll earn the potential to unlock yet another anonymous car. I say the potential because you actually unlock a license test that, in turn, unlocks the car. Yes, for some reason there are license tests here. I can only imagine some project manager dashing into a conference room at the last minute screaming “Guys, I just played Gran Turismo. We need license tests!”
Cue game developers groaning and rolling their eyes, and some poor soul slapping together the most rudimentary of challenges. Each test is simply a re-used race stage with the first mile filled with traffic cones outlining a sort of autocross obstacle course. The rest of the stage? Absolutely wide open. It’s the same test for every car, and they’re anything but challenging. I once got stuck against the wall for a good 30 seconds, hit about a dozen cones, and still finished with a minute to spare.
Hitting the wall is something you’ll do a lot of in Hooters Road Trip. After spending more hours than I care to admit playing this game, I got to the point where I could win races despite what is easily the most curious physics I’ve ever experienced in a driving game. Every car feels like it’s propped up on a 14-inch eBay lift kit with the anti-roll bars disconnected. Small steering inputs do nothing, until suddenly the car veers across the road and into the wall. I can only assume this is what driving drunk feels like.
