Rogue Trip : Vacation 2012
Too Funny Game #4
Type of Game
A Crazy Taxi launched into nightmarish arenas to satisfy the whims of suicidal tourists. It makes no sense, it's brilliant.
Release date on Our Machines
November 1998, three months before Crazy Taxi hit the arcades, so it was Crazy Taxi that was inspired by Rogue Trip!
Developer
SingleTrac Entertainment Technologies, Inc. Such a long name, such a short lifespan.
Publisher
GT Interactive Software Corp., better known as ‘Did Atari swallow you too?’
Rogue Trip : nowhere to be found, vaporized by its own missiles.
I'm cheating a little with this game. I didn't know it in the twentieth century, but rather in 2005-2006. During that period, which lasted over a year, neither my best friend Randall Geyser nor I had girlfriends. We suffered quite a bit, no doubt about it. That was all we talked about: finding a girl. We theorised about what we called ‘the aura of the settled guy’, who attracted girls without having to do anything because he was already in a relationship, while singles like us scared them away despite all our efforts. We saw it as inevitable, when in fact it was most likely due to our behaviour, which combined emotional despair and a lack of self-confidence. Oh yes, and injunctions urging us to behave like dominant, conquering alpha males. We happily wallowed in these injunctions; we hadn't yet understood that we had to move away from them to become people worth spending time with. What did we do to remedy our misfortunes? Did we socialise by going out more and doing fulfilling activities? No way! We geeked out like brutes, of course!
A profitable single life
When Randall came over to my place back then, we would play the hell out of Mario Kart 64, Turtles in Time, Bubble Bobble or Gauntlet IV on an emulator. At his place, we would sometimes dig out the PS1 to try out games we had never played before. Strangely, I only remember one game: the famous Rogue Trip. At the same time, every game had us crying with laughter until our stomachs hurt. I think we'd still be playing it today if we hadn't found partners, by some miracle. We'd look terrible, we'd still be eating three low-budget sausages per meal (me, anyway), but our life expectancy would be around a thousand years (due to the fits of laughter, obviously). But hey, we couldn't live forever in an arena full of weird, over-equipped vehicles, saturated with explosions, alien attacks and experimental weapons, while denying our indelible nature as toxic males... or maybe we could. A significant part of my subconscious would have liked to see that, actually.
The end of the world in 2012, as predicted
But why ‘Vacation 2012’? In 1998, I guess it sounded a bit futuristic to say 2012, but not that much. To imagine a dystopian world in the midst of civilisational collapse, with lasers, giant energy arcs and mutant chickens devouring cars, you could easily add a century. Okay, half a century, I revise my judgement in light of the current climate mess, which is only getting worse. To set this in 2012, the developers had to be pretty pessimistic. But why not, it's still better than climate sceptics. Rogue Trip isn't a racing game, though, and only offers arena deathmatches. So what? Well, nothing, that's more than enough, especially in split-screen multiplayer. I didn't even know there was a single-player mode in there. Before I looked it up, anyway. You do follow some kind of storyline, with cars and other goodies to unlock by completing the characters' stories, but frankly, it's much more fun with two players.
You play as one of sixteen drivers, each more crazy than the last. Each one drives their own vehicle, with varying stats, including manoeuvrability, speed, resistance and weight. Oh, and they all have their own special weapon, because merriment and festivities, all that. Who hasn't dreamed of crushing their neighbour with a giant sausage? Or sending a horde of explosive poodles through their windscreen? Or cutting them into pieces with two circular saws replacing the front wheels of your car? Of course everyone has dreamed of it. Add to that various items available to the general public, such as a flamethrower, a machine gun, guided and unguided missiles, and you've got everything you need to have a blast on a dozen stages, ranging from a giant casino to luxury seaside hotels, a fortified mansion guarded by helicopters, and Area 51 with its direct access to a lunar base... all with a rather appealing post-apocalyptic touch.
​We often headed to Eternal Acres, a more open level with rolling meadows, which was more suited to non-stop brawling. I don't think we ever unlocked the entire cast, since you had to finish the game with certain specific vehicles. But then again, we were having too much fun to even think about it. And by finishing the game, I mean doing the exact opposite of what we were doing. Deathmatch was effectively a secondary mode. The primary feature does involve fighting in closed arenas, but with one important detail. I say this as if I know, even though I've never tried it, but I want to trust those who have written real reviews based on their full experience of the game. It's not as if I have a choice, anyway. The reason the title mentions Trip and Vacation is because the crazy characters you can play all do the same job: taxi driver for tourist, or Auto Mercenary, as stated in-game.
One tourist per stage, whom we have to pick up first to take him to specific places he absolutely wants to photograph, so he can tell what's left of his family how much he enjoyed his trip. He rewards us by paying us handsomely, so of course we're going to listen to him. With the money, we repair our car, so it can withstand the next holiday season! Aaah, but that's why all these idiots are fighting each other! When you take two minutes to put yourself in their shoes, it becomes much easier to understand their problems. But who would want to waste their time off in places like this, seriously? Especially when being taken for a ride by completely crazy individuals. Be careful, because at any moment, the tourist might panic and flee from our taxi screaming.
Sometimes because of our slightly nervous driving, often because he can't stand the sight of missiles grazing his camera. I did say at any moment, so. Our opponents also get it back by smashing our heads hard enough to eject him from our cockpit. Tourism is a dangerous occupation in 2012! Probably an ultra-rich person's delusion. Mind you, it only seems to interest a jaded high roller, a bitter old lady, and a rude alien. No doubt a fantasy for the ultra-rich, for sure. The core of Rogue Trip combines the car-busting aspects of Destruction Derby with the addition of futuristic weapons reminiscent of WipEout, but with a twist! Yes, a twist, a word very similar to... Twisted Metal, perhaps? I deserve to have rotten eggs thrown at my face for daring to make such a disgusting transition.
Nevertheless, Rogue Trip is a direct descendant of its spiritual predecessor Twisted Metal 2, developed by the same team at SingleTrac. Fans of the franchise will surely recognise the influences, particularly in the artwork and grotesque cutscenes on many aspects. I'm not one of those people. Why not release Twisted Metal 3, rather than a game with an almost identical concept but in a different universe? Because the rights to the franchise had fallen into the hands of another studio in the meantime! While I don't know the details of the story, I did learn that SingleTrac was so upset about no longer being able to work on Twisted Metal, that not only does Rogue Trip use the same mechanics better, but it was also released about A MONTH BEFORE Twisted Metal 3. And it received more favourable reviews. Right, a little middle finger in passing, just like that.
Apparently, a sequel was supposed to be released not too long after, and the team had even worked quite hard on it. But Sony rushed to buy the studio and canceled the project, as if to prevent another disaster from happening. But how? Excuse me? Where did they get that idea, when the press and gamers' reviews of Rogue Trip suggested that a new version could be a commercial success, provided that a few things were refined and a few other things were fleshed out (I'll refrain from specifying which ones). Unless the last real game developed by SingleTrac caused them to lose all credibility? Animorphs: Shattered Reality. Yeah, a PS1 adaptation of the Animorphs books. And it didn't work. It was a bold move, mind you. But hey, people turning into animals, um, how can I put this? Leave that to Bloody Roar, eh. That's the kind of suicidal courage that's missing from the world of video games today. Or not.
Post-Apo-Rock-Neo-Ska-Jazzy-ARG
Well, here we go again... another game to add to the pile of soundtracks that have been erased from my memory. I listened to some of the tracks several times, hoping to rekindle something, but no luck. Sorry, we were too busy crying about our incel status, which was temporary, of course, but which we still believed to be eternal at the time. We were having a little too much fun too, screaming with rage when the other guy blew up our car. So we couldn't hear anything. Well, I'll make an effort to talk about it anyway. Chuck E. Myers and Tom Hopkins are at the helm. I've never heard of them, but that's my problem, because their careers exude a certain class. Twisted Metal 1 and 2, Looney Tunes Racing, but also Top Spin and Dance Dance Revolution for the former. More recently, a little indie game called Hogwarts Legacy has appeared on their CV. Yep, these guys are still hard at work, it seems. They've even won awards and official distinctions for their work! So what exactly did they do on Rogue Trip? Let's see: trashy ska, lame rock, stupid country, or even rap, jazz and even wacky-wierdo big beat (yeah, I was starting to run out of inspiration). The two musicians shower us with all their knowledge at once. Okay, they know a lot. I think I can safely say that some of the tracks, although beautifully annoying in the long run, couldn't be played by just anyone. I know next to nothing about music, music theory, melody creation and all that, but you can tell there's a certain level of skill involved. An annoying, even distressing level at times. But it still falls under the category of undeniable skill. And it fits well with the ultra-violent, festive, Mad Max-esque chaos of this game. However, at the risk of missing the true essence of this OST, I prefer to share the track that annoys me the least, rather than the one that best captures the crazy atmosphere unique to Rogue Trip.
Closed parenthesis
Okay, that's enough of that one. We got through it pretty quickly, in the end. Even without playing through the story mode from top to bottom, I mean. Anyway, in 2006, my nostalgia was no longer attached to video games, even if they were developed in 1998.
What's more, thinking about Rogue Trip immediately reminds me of my situation as a poor little kitten abandoned in the forest, with no little cat gril to lavish love on me. And even though I no longer fear reliving that today, the anxiety I felt at the time still makes me uncomfortable. All my friend and I had to do was keep playing PlayStation, and we wouldn't have condemned this game to giving us a bad image of ourselves. But no, we preferred to argue because we couldn't reconcile our schedules, which had become much busier now that we had both found girlfriends, almost simultaneously, at that. I don't think we ever played the console together again after that, even though the argument didn't last very long. We were just turning the page on a period that was both extremely fun and extremely awful. Just like Rogue Trip, in fact.
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