Juiced preview

Back in 2003 developers Rage ceased business for good. Considering their display of titles this might not have been the biggest blow to the game industry. The company produced some major hits though; the boxing game Rocky and two outstanding GBA games: Go Go Beckham and Denki Blocks (the latter won the Game of the Year award at ECTS 2001). At that time Rage’s Warrington Studios were developing something that could have become a huge success: Lamborghini, which was a racing game featuring cars from the famous company and intended to be released for all three consoles. The game was nearly done when the company had to close.

Priceless juice

When Rage closed EA bought the rights for Lamborghini and also wanted to hire the development team, who oddly declined. EA then decided to cancel the game, which means that your only shot at trying Lamborghini is having issue fourteen of Official Xbox Magazine, where a demo of the game was bundled. If you have this demo, hold on to it as it is a unique piece of video game history. The almost-finished game itself is probably buried in the tombs beneath EA’s headquarters somewhere.

The developers that started the original Lamborghini decided instead to make an entirely new racing game from scratch. This resulted in the founding of Juice Games and their first racing game: Juiced.

Serious street racing

Juiced is a street racing game, but as opposed to other games in this genre Juice Games have a rather serious take on this particular form of motor sports. Lo and behold; the elite drivers in street racing aren’t a bunch of wise guy hip hop gangsta dudes, only wanting to make the streets hazardous to ordinary drivers. No, they are serious race drivers who want to be part of the international motor sports scene. The game is placed fairly even between simulation and arcade, offering something for hardcore enthusiasts and Sunday drivers alike.

Juiced has real cars with real modifications and one of the biggest problems with realistic racing games is that the car manufacturers often don’t want the thrashing of their cars displayed on screen. Still, Juice Games have succeeded in gathering fifty official cars from manufacturers such as Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Dodge, Ford, Fiat, Renault and many others. All cars can be crashed most realistically and Juice Games apparently didn’t have any problems securing the deal with the car manufacturers. They only had one demand: you pay for whatever you crash, meaning that reckless driving can be an expensive affair indeed. Not only that, but you also lose respect from fellow drivers if you drive irresponsibly.

The garage will probably be your second home as Juiced offers you modifications enough to make the total number of cars go from fifty to about a hojillion. You’ll have ample opportunity to make your car famous via Xbox Live.

Win a brand new car!

You start out in the bottom ranks of street racing. You are a poor but skilled driver and quite adept at tuning cars. From these humble beginnings you have to work your way up the ranks and win money and respect, eventually leading to teams inviting you to drive for them, which enables you to cooperate with your team mates on the track. With the push of a button you can order your team mates to put pressure on an opponent, fall back or make room and so forth. This is quite unique for a racing game and it creates entirely new ways of driving. You can also perform various tricks and stunts, make bets and win the ultimate prize in online games: your opponent’s car if you win!

Juiced will be released in September for PC, Xbox and PS2 with all versions online enabled of course. The game is published by Acclaim who must be quite pleased that they have a street racing game that can compete with Need for Speed: Underground 2, now that EA snatched Burnout 3 from them.


Source: Boomtown DK
English version by: Julian Henlov (Progrock)