Fans were eagerly anticipating its release, but Carmageddon Reincarnation was so poorly optimised that hardly anyone could play it – even on powerful PCs that were more than capable of running it.
Carmageddon: Max Damage is essentially a port of Carmageddon Reincarnation originally released on PC in 2014 following a highly successful Kickstarter campaign.
Nearly 20 years later, the series has made a fighting comeback on consoles with Carmageddon: Max Damage developed by original series creators Stainless Games. The damage modelling was impressively intricate for the time, and the open world tracks were revolutionary in a racing game. It’s a shame, because Carmageddon had some genuinely revolutionary features beyond its gratuitous gore and puerile humour which were overlooked (you can read more about Carmageddon’s colourful history in our developer interview looking back at the series). Indeed, the series regularly appears in ‘top 10 most controversial games of all time’ list features for its graphic depictions of 3D pedestrian-pummelling violence that were genuinely shocking at a time when Grand Theft Auto was a tame-looking 2D game. The level progressions follow the original game fairly closely, the entire game speeding up or slowing down depending on the level you are playing.When you think of Carmageddon, you automatically associate it with controversy. just to give players a bit of a surprise every once in a while. Likewise the movement restructions of not being able to turn upwards at the two center "T" shaped maze section while present, has a 1 in 10 chance of being ignored. but they've been tweaked with a bit of randomness to make them a hair less predictable. Likewise their pursuit mode logic is a bit different - for the most part the red ghost still tracks you directly, the magenta ghost tries to get in front of you, the cyan one's accuracy decreases the further away the red one is from you, and the brown one is still a bit. As such I have changed their flee logic to be a bit more intelligent, making you have to put a bit more effort into hunting them down. When the ghost go into 'flee' mode when you eat one of the four super-pellets the ghosts are cut to half speed - this proved using the 'random movement' logic to be too easy despite being remarkably close to the original game's logic. It was impractical to recreate that at such a low resolution so instead I gave the player a one pixel "boot in the patoot" at every corner to give a slight advantage. In the original you could take corners faster than the ghosts by clipping the edges of each turn - this was called "cornering" by most players. For example the animation appeared jerky trying to make the ghosts move faster or slower than PakuPaku, so they are for the most part the same speed. The game logic is similar in most respects to the original, though due to the 8:3 reduction in game resolution many elements had to be dropped or faked. Regarding gameplay logic, this is directly from the dev, Jason Knight: A new MS-DOS game? From the year 2011? Yes, they DO exist, and this awesome Pac-Man game by Jason Knight is living proof!