Fun for a while... Then just boring!
Well, not such a bad first impression as one would expect from an Atari racer! Great graphics with attention given to the minimal detail, great sound effects, good and funny gameplay - here is where it gets to be boring after a while, it's a very arcadish style gameplay.
You start getting your first few glories and actually growing in the community of Oahu. Buy cars, houses, bikes, clothes (pointless), you name it! You can buy many things but only a few actually mean anything for the game itself! Example? You don't get anything out of having a suit on or a pair of snickers with jeans and a plain shirt... It's just meaningless!
After you play it for a while you just get bored! Give lifts and having to drive politely in order to get coupons to buy clothing is nothing. Never seen it before and couldn't think of anything more obnoxious than that! Some hitchhickers (male or female) even request that you have a specific car or car type (2 seater is the most common)! Unbelievable, right? Maybe stupid is the right word!
Then the gameplay gets in the way! Races are fun! You can bang other cars and like a 90's arcade game you get to have fun doing them. The problem appears when you have to do Time Attacks or Speed Trap races. The whole concept of the game and the world it sets upon is not designed for it. The roads have too many glitches, like bumps, but it's clearly a design flaw. Sometimes you see other cars smoking and sparking from below, even slow cars, like there were steps on the road... Not pretty and a huge obstacle for clean Time Attacks. You need a whole lot of luck in order to complete most of them, instead of skills, which would be the right thing! Speed Trap races suffer from the same problems and there's an aggravation to this mode. Sometimes you actually have to go deliberately offroad to make the speed. Shouldn't happen!
After all this game stands in the pot of the first games coming out for the third generation systems, but there are better ones to play, even though this was, at the time, an excellent example of what these consoles were capable of achieving.
Good multiplayer even after all this years.
Not worth buying for simulation fanatics like me that enjoy having a point in what we're doing and enjoy doing it the right way!