Rollcage Stage II
| Rollcage Stage II | |
|---|---|
| Rollcage Stage II
Cover art of Rollcage Stage II
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| Developer(s) | Attention to Detail |
| Publisher(s) |
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| Series | Rollcage |
| Platforms | PlayStation Microsoft Windows |
| Release date(s) |
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| Genre(s) | Racing |
| Mode(s) | Single-player or multiplayer |
Rollcage Stage II is an arcade-style racing game for PlayStation & Microsoft Windows developed by Attention to Detail, and published by Psygnosis. It is the sequel to Rollcage and was released in 2000. On top of the basic racing concept, the cars can be equipped with weapons, which are picked up on the track as bonuses, which can be used against competing cars. The automobiles themselves, once again, have wheels that are larger than the body of the car thus creating a car that has no up or down and therefore can be flipped yet continue to drive.
For the North American Windows PC release, game publisher Take-Two Interactive repackaged the original European/Australasian version as "Death Track Racing".
Rollcage Stage II was also among the very first titles to feature hardware-accelerated bump mapping upon its release in March 2000, in the form of EMBM (Environment Mapped Bump Mapping). RSII was designed to be best experienced at the time on Matrox Millenium G400 graphics cards, released in mid-1999, which had exclusive support for EMBM until the ATI Radeon was released in late-2000. Matrox's bump mapping technology was much hyped by industry press outlets at the time, with Matrox demoing Rollcage Stage II as a cutting-edge showcase for their cards, as well as dedicating a page on their website to the game.[1][2]
Contents
Tracks
There are 6 different environments, with 3 or 4 tracks in each. There are the returning Harpoon (an exotic island) and Outworld (tracks that take place on a different planet) tracks, as well as 4 new ones: Skyway, which are all tracks built high in the sky, Ventura, which is in a rocky desert, and the even more futuristic Leviathan and Jumpgate tracks (Leviathan tracks are situated on an alien planet or asteroid and Jumpgate is a complex of buildings built in space). These are all spread into 5 different leagues which must be completed to unlock new cars and other things. Jumpgate isn't available until the Type II Campaign is completed.
Cars
Instead of having to drive the cars of some drivers, you get to pick out of 20 cars from 5 different manufacturers which included SubSonic, Vostok, Richter, Unity, and Patriot. These cars each have a Type I, Type II and Type III version, which all give the player a different paint job. Each car, except the first ones obtained when a campaign is completed, is unlocked by winning a race respective to that car. So some things are unlocked by just beating the campaigns, but getting a car for every race won is a nice bonus. The Type III cars are only unlocked when you find a smiley face token in the same track that you won the Type I and Type II cars on.
All weapons from Rollcage return except for the Ice Sheet weapon. The Wormhole weapon was also changed, as well as the Missile weapon. New weapons are added e.g. Stasis Beam.
Other modes include "Scramble", where your car is placed on a floating track and the objective is to get to the finish line as fast as possible. This is very difficult due to the many obstacles such as thin bumpy roads, big jumps, snow on the track, and more. It is also possible to create shortcuts which are usually extremely dangerous and hard to perform and it is often hard to even discover how to find the shortcut on some tracks where the shortcut is hidden.
There is also a "Demolition" mode where the objective is to destroy as much items on the track as possible, either against the clock or in a two-player setting. Additional two-player modes such as "Rubble Soccer," "Combat Mode," "Time Attack," and "Pursuit" a "Training" is included for new players along with "Survivor" and a race in which every track is raced one after the other with the aim of setting a total record.
Multiplayer
The game handles multiplayer games over LAN or direct IP connection.
To act as a meeting point, a multiplayer community has been created.
Soundtrack
PlayStation
| No. | Title | Artist | Length |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | "Breakbeat Generation" | E-Z Rollers | |
| 2. | "Double Cross" | E-Z Rollers | |
| 3. | "Deadline" | Technical Itch | |
| 4. | "Caution" | Technical Itch | |
| 5. | "Penetration" | Omni Trio | |
| 6. | "Secret Life" | Omni Trio | |
| 7. | "Control" | Aquasky | |
| 8. | "Halifax" | Aquasky | |
| 9. | "Imaginary Forces" | Flytronix | |
| 10. | "Naked Funk" | Flytronix | |
| 11. | "Spooks" | Dom and Roland | |
| 12. | "Slipstream" | Dom and Roland |
PC
All songs written and composed by Gary McKill (MKL).
| No. | Title | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | "Snar Nation" | |
| 2. | "Control" | |
| 3. | "Driller Killer" | |
| 4. | "Lethal Injection" | |
| 5. | "Red Wards" | |
| 6. | "Dark Angel" | |
| 7. | "Beat Down" | |
| 8. | "Unknown" | |
| 9. | "Surrender" |
Spiritual successors
While ATD and Psygnosis did not continue on the Rollcage series, ATD later developed the game Firebugs featuring roughly the same racing concept.
In 2015, a group of developers called Caged Element launched a Kickstarter campaign for GRIP, a spiritual successor for the Rollcage series. A prototype was completed before the Kickstarter campaign using Unreal Engine 4. The development staff has two people who worked on the Rollcage series and the soundtrack has artists Technical Itch and Dom & Roland who were on the soundtrack for Rollcage Stage II.[3] The Kickstarter was cancelled after it raised $167,000CAD$ dollars out of the needed 667,000. The game continued development and moved to donations.
References
- ↑ Ars Technica - Comdex '99 article
- ↑ Wayback Machine - Matrox.com Feature Stories: Rollcage Stage II
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
