New Homebrew Game: Micro Motor Mayhem!

Miniature cars hit the streets — or rather, the tabletop — in Micro Motor Mayhem, the newest Saturn homebrew game.

Developer JBeretta, known for last year’s SegaXtreme Game Contest original game winner Cold Case , uploaded his latest creation Saturday to a SegaXtreme Resources page .

“It’s a bit like Micro Machines, a bit like Mario Kart,” JBeretta said in the description of a YouTube video showing off the game.

www.youtube.com

Indeed, Micro Motor Mayhem resembles the Micro Machines top-down racing games found on consoles like the Mega Drive and Master System, with miniature cars driving around locations like a kitchen table, a workbench, a desktop, a pool table and even a gigantic dessert. It brings a Mario Kart-like twist with item boxes and grant power-ups like temporary speed boosts, shields, shrinking your opponents, rockets and bombs.

From the main menu, there are four modes: Practice, time attack, single race and 2 player VS. Practice allows a player to choose any of the game’s 14 tracks and race on it endlessly alone, while time attack gives a solitary player three laps to beat a target time on a track, with item boxes giving speed boosts. “Single race” lets a solitary player take on three computer opponents, racing on each track in the game while getting points based on finishing position. The 2 player VS mode is the game’s human multiplayer option.

Unlike the Micro Machines racers of old, Micro Motor Mayhem gives players a choice of a fixed camera angle or one that follows directly behind the player’s car for a more traditional racing game feel, selectable from the pause menu. The Y button can cycle through four different zoom levels for the camera, too.

The fixed camera angle at four different zoom levels.

The follow camera angle at four different zoom levels.

There are eight vehicles from which to choose, too, with customizable color schemes to really personalize the experience.

The game still has some rough patches to iron out, which JBeretta acknowledges on SegaXtreme.

Among the known bugs are:

• An odd bug with the sound effects before the race starts
• Sometimes power-up boxes don’t reappear
• CPU cars are bad at the pool table levels
• Physics are a bit crazy sometimes when hitting walls or other players
• Players can get stuck (they can reset to last checkpoint in pause menu)
• Not enough checkpoints so players can be sent back quite far on some levels
• Current position shown not always accurately during a race
• Runs slower on PAL consoles — JBeretta is working on a PAL version with adjusted speeds

“It’s still not totally finished so there will be bugs — please let me know if you find any,” he said.

It’s still got more music planned, too, as right now songs play during the title screen and the tracks that take place on two of the five environments.

Despite the issues remaining, Micro Motor Mayhem is already a complete enough package for players to have a lot of fun with it. It’ll be interesting to see what JBeretta can do to push the game over the finish line.

	Danthrax
		Danthrax is a contributor to the Shiro Media Group, writing stories for the website when Saturn news breaks. While he was a Sega Genesis kid in the '90s, he didn't get a Saturn until 2018. It didn't take him long to fall in love with the console's library as well as the fan translation and homebrew scene. He contributed heavily to the Bulk Slash and Stellar Assault SS fan localizations, and has helped as an editor on several other Saturn and Dreamcast fan projects such as Cotton 2, Rainbow Cotton and Sakura Wars Columns 2.