Cars - Brief Trip Down The Countryside

30/03/26

I think the closest thing I can say to something funny about my history with Cars is that when I was much younger, not even a teenager, I went to the movies with my old best friend, Jesse. We had the choice of seeing Cars, or Adam Sandler’s Click. I wanted to see Cars, and we saw Cars. In retrospect… eh. I don’t have any strong feelings towards Cars anymore, besides the endless torrent of washed goat memes, but I really don’t think the emotional gutpunch of Click would’ve hit ten-year old Mitch the same way. Ah well. I had a good time. Much like I surprisingly had a good - yet brief - time with this Game Boy Advance adaptation! For a throwaway tie-in, Cars driving has way more sauce than you’d expect - but just as it really starts to click, ka-chow! It’s over.

Cars for the GBA is one of those weird, pseudo-sequels to their source material. Much like Finding Nemo: The Continuing Adventures, it doesn’t go against the canon (talking about the canon of Cars of all things is hilarious), being more of an ‘unseen story’ between the movies. Pretty much the perfect format for any tie-in like this. Taking place ostensibly at the next Piston Cup following the events of Cars, Lightning McQueen has to win a number of qualifying races in the countryside to participate in the four stadium matches to compete in the Cup proper. As expected, it’s an average set-up for one of these tie-in games, but whilst nothing here blew my socks off, it’s all pretty solid.

I Am Speed

And that solid nature is core to the foundation of Car’s surprisingly good racing. Two kinds of races are present in Cars - rally-style races where you’re just trying to get to the end of a more winding, complex singular track, and more traditional circuit, lap-based races, both in country-side promotional races and the main, stadium-based set pieces of the game: The Piston Cup.

Considering how the GBA doesn’t really feel made for the racing game genre, I was honestly really surprised by Cars; obviously it’s not going to stand up to pretty much anything on console, but there is a baseline amount of *sauce* that makes Cars feel great to play in the moment. The animation work on the racers is simple, but it goes a huge distance in just making it feel great. The way they twist and turn on the myriad of corners is great. I’ve quickly found that I much prefer the isometric look for a portable racer as opposed to the Mario Kart-style ‘behind the kart’ perspective, since you’ve got a better view on everything going on around your racer.

Not to pull out an old trope, but Cars does a pretty good job of putting you behind the wheel and make you *feel* like Lightning McQueen. You feel fast - like speed. The controls feel real tight, putting a focus on sudden turns, high-speed racing and everything that comes with that. Early on, I felt almost like Lightning in the movie - I’d screw up some basic turns because I was trying to go as fast as possible, but once I started employing the power-slide to brake around corners, the racing felt so much more continuous and fluid it just felt right. The best of the game comes in the early game, with the high speed of the cross-country stages feeling good. Real good. The landscape soars past, turns come hard and fast, and there’s a real sense of movement and friction that comes with making these tight turns.

The downside to the fast pace of these stages mostly comes down to the more complex turns, and the speed up/down icons you’ll run across. Conceptually, they’re great, but it just doesn’t all blend together that well. For the former issue, the game does warn you when a turn is coming up, but sometimes it feels like you’ll have less than a second to react before slamming unceremoniously into the corner. Though more often than not, I’d just kind of bounce and keep going, rather than spinning out, so it’s not that bad. But you get no warning for those damn speed up/down signs, leading to the occasional loss as I seemingly serpentined my way past the speedups, and hit each and every speed down. Lovely. The game, overall, isn’t remotely difficult - I only lost a few of the early races because I was still getting to grips with the movement and the quick turns, but once that was set, it was only some brutal random chance that stole victory from the jaws of defeat for my opponents.

The Country Mouse, or the Piston Cup Mouse

The game has around twelve of these countryside-based events to complete, and completion of them all is required to finish the four centerpieces of the game that make up the biggest prices in racing: The Piston Cup. Despite the emphasis placed on them, the Piston Cup Stadium races are not remotely quite as engaging, being more ‘traditional’ races where you just lap around a circular track six times until someone wins. The more monotone nature of these races are offset a bit by the drafting mechanic unique to these; due to most of the cars going at around the same speed down long, flat tracks, your primary method of pulling ahead apart is simple. Aside from hoping your competitors just screw up turns and plow into a wall, pulling behind a car ahead of you will slowly fill up a gauge at the bottom of the screen. At any point, you can hit R to hit a boost of speed to try and gain some ground.

But other than that? There’s barely any turns, monotone visuals, and sometimes you’ll play perfectly and the #2 racer will just randomly pull ahead at the last turn. I know that it’s just not how stadium races like these work, but I just wish they had more in common with the non-Piston events that come before; rally races and more varied track layouts would go a long way in making them stick out beyond just drafting endlessly. Hell, there’s not even any special music or anything to real sell the grand nature of these races - just hearing your engine whir for a couple of minutes as you endlessly cycle the track does not remotely help - to the point it was actively annoying one of my friends I was streaming this game to.

Gone In A Flash

Despite the good and the uninteresting, Cars don’t roll on for that long. It’s an incredibly short game for anyone above the age of twelve, with me hitting credits after about an hour of play after winning every race. The only thing to do beyond that is collecting Gold Medals upon replaying non-stadium races, but any rewards for this are lackluster at best, and even collecting them isn’t too much of a task. As opposed to something like Diddy Kong Racing, which had a similar system where you had to collect all the Silver Coins in a single race, AND win, Cars will save your collection progress between races, so you can just repeat races as often as you want if you want to go the distance and collect everything. Not that the collectibles are that interesting - just a bunch of colours for Lighting McQueen and the ‘ol Pixar special: screenshots from the movies!

Joy.

Lastly, being the double gut-punch of a Pixar ‘sequel’ and a racing game means there’s little story beyond being the next year’s Piston Cup following the movie, but the little amount of writing present in the game really nails the wacky, banter-filled style of the movies. It’s funny, genuinely funny, especially when it comes to pretty much any conversation between Lightning McQueen and his premier rival, Chick Hicks. They’re all full of sly, snappy jokes and barely veiled hatred, you love to see it. Hell, even Mater, a character who can grow very, very annoying very, very quickly, works here in the little role he has. Look, there really isn’t *that* much to say - much like last week’s game, story is an afterthought. But when it’s an afterthought, and they’re not just recycling stuff from the movies or throwing up screenshots to serve as a story? I’ll take it.

Cars, being as transitory as it is, is nothing to write home about, but considering the rest of Pixar’s handheld - and hell, most of their console - output, Cars is perfectly serviceable. There’s some real tasty sauce heaped on it’s otherwise simplistic driving mechanics, and the writing helps capture what makes the Pixar films of this era so charming. I just wish the central set piece of the game - the Piston Cup stadium races - weren’t so much more boring than their countryside brethren. Look, I think the racing game scene on the GBA is quite weak to start with, and Cars isn’t doing much to bulk it up, but it has inherent charm and sauce enough to not throw it directly into the bargain bin with the rest of the genre. So I’ll just end this with a car-like: KA-CHOW!

Thanks for reading my review of Cars! Really glad to play something half-decent two weeks in a row, I should be nice to myself and pick something that looks good for next time. As always, you can email me at mgoerge7003@hotmail.com if you have any questions or requests, or find me around the internet under GameBoyAbyss. Thanks again for reading, and I’ll see you next time.