And you ramp off a rugged hill, top speed, airborne; your tachometer peaks, your engine revs free. It’s bliss, in a way. And you’re down clatter, shocks squeeze, slip traction skid; grip and you’re off again racing an arrow straight for smoke. No time to kill but stones to juke.
Smuggler’s Run for the Game Boy Advance (Rebellion/Destination Software, 2002) is a port of the PlayStation 2 version developed by Rockstar San Diego (then Angel Studios) and published by Rockstar. Every Smuggler’s Run (there’s a sequel and then a GameCube port) is wicked fun, an adrenaline rush that doesn’t stop. The music kicks into gear immediately and your rivals won’t wait for you to shift.
On mountainous, rugged terrain, your goal is to race to a smoke signal, pick up contraband (the “smuggling” part), then deliver it to another smoke signal across the open map. Sometimes, allies help out, opponents jostle for the goods, and police give chase with sirens howling. If another vehicle checks you while you’re holding the contraband, they’ll steal it from you. Likewise, you’ll nab contraband from another vehicle when you tag it. Scraping paint, losing parts, and nabbing goods is crucial element of physicality and friction. It’s tense too, when you just barely miss a delivery and you spin around for another pass, probably overshooting the smoke and terrified that an enemy will ram you from behind, robbing your efforts of payoff.
Smuggler’s Run is about speed, traction, and air. The sound design is critical and euphoric. You’ll be racing with tires digging up dirt, then fly off a hill airbound and your tires spin free, your engine revs, and your tachometer peaks. The tachometer serves only to represent the engine’s load while driving, feedback for your speed, irrelevant to handling and functioning. Please watch this recording demonstrating the sound.
Driving straight isn’t always straight-forward. There’s little time to assess obstacles while plotting a course. You can pause play and open a map with select, which can be useful but isn’t practical for frequent access. You’ll mostly be relying upon a green arrow on the HUD pointing you to your next smoke signal. But the smoke signals themselves are pretty small, have only moderate draw distance, and have a cruelly miniscule pick up range. Furthermore, rocks, shrubs, and trees obstruct your path. The obstacles are balanced well for the world, I think, fairly placed and sized so that you pass by a fair few by luck but will slam into plenty if you’re not keeping an eye out or aren’t in control of your car. Learning to balance the two was key to enjoying the game. Here’s another video, discussing learning to play the game right.
I enjoyed the heck out of this game and will pop in the cartridge now and again to enjoy the adrenaline. Used cartridges run cheap right now, so I recommend picking up a copy if you have a Game Boy Advance compatible device.
Posts
