Crazy Frog Racer

DS review by Matt Wadleigh, published on Monday 17th September 2007

You’re probably already familiar with the Crazy Frog, as this site’s main audience is North American and European gamers. Known also as “The Annoying Thing,” this marketing icon was created to sell ringtones and somehow became popular because it made a ring-ding-ding noise and people are easily amused. Tons of toys and other marketing materials have been created and millions have squandered their earnings purchasing irritating trinkets that inevitably ended up in their garbage cans a few months later. Given videogaming’s predilection towards licensing, a company eventually got a hold of the license to create Crazy Frog related video games. Yet another cash-in on this unreasonably popular marketing icon and much like the Annoying Thing himself, Crazy Frog Racer is a stupid and shallow racer that is never entertaining and not worth your time.

There are very few options for gamers that actually do sit down and play this game. Upon loading it up, you can select either a championship race, a single race, or a multiplayer race if one of your friends should also be shackled with the burden of owning this game. Once you choose your race type, you can select a character from the eight offered, which includes the Annoying Thing (who will probably be the only character anyone who plays this game will select). Each different racer has unique stats, but they seem rather pointless once the actual racing starts.

The reason why the stats don’t matter is because Crazy Frog Racer is one of the easiest racing games I have encountered. I never lost a single race, even when I completely messed up parts. If I fell behind, it almost seemed like the other racers completely stopped and waited for me to get ahead of them. Also included is an utterly useless weapons system. Despite playing on the higher difficulty levels, no computer controlled opponent ever used a weapon against me, and I never once had to use one to retain the lead.

The biggest difficulty is just finishing a three-lap race. The tracks aren’t overly large, but they feel a lot longer than they are because they’re simply tracks floating in a water-colored sky, with no real scenery or backgrounds to spice things up. There are some sections of track that are purposefully missing to make it harder for the player, but these are hardly a challenge for anyone who’s spent some time with Mario Kart. The game is nothing to look at and even abysmal racers like Monster Trucks DS pulled of a better graphics engine. The drivers don’t look all that bad, but the environment cracks and fractures quite frequently. The draw distance is shameful and there’s no sense of speed, which are especially unsatisfactory offenses after Mario Kart DS managed to look so good.

Perhaps the worst offense of all is that the very noise that made Crazy Frog a fad - that infectious “ring-ding-ding” - is scarcely heard in the game. I only heard it after I finished a race, not during acceleration like you might expect. Instead, you must suffer through really crappy synthesized techno music that sounds like something I could make with a basic freeware program I downloaded off the Internet.

This game should never have been made in the first place because the result was almost certainly going to be this: Crazy Frog Racer is awful. It’s not worth your time for any reason whatsoever. If you want a racing game, stick with Mario Kart DS or many of the other racers available for the system.