There are a lot of people out there who, despite the fact that it happened years ago, like to debate why Sega shut down.  And the reasons are always plentiful, if a bit outlandish.  Things like insufficient processing power, a glut of games in the market, a low number of total releases, payoffs from Big N or Sony or Microsoft, and so on right down the line.

But one thing I think they all–indeed, WE all–can agree on is it wasn’t from a lack of quality games.  Sega’s been making them fun and offbeat for some time now.  In fact, one of Sega’s biggest advances came in the development of the “wacky car” subgenre, as personified by its Crazy Taxi title.  And they advanced this concept outward into a safari hunting game, and more recently, into a car battle game.  We’ll be going over that one today, a fun little title called Full Auto.

Full Auto doesn’t have much in the way of a plot: basically you just drive around and blast other cars into shredded smoking metal with a handful of weapons including land mines, machine guns, and missiles, among others.  You can likely insert your own motivations in here, somewhere, for extra fun–maybe the guy in the lead car killed your wife and you’re playing Jason Statham.

A game like this presents lots of opportunities for fun.  Driving around, blasting other cars?  That sounds like a party.  And indeed, the opportunities for multiplayer gaming are there and ready at any time.  Get a few friends together and Full Auto may well be the highlight of your evening.  Of course, this begs the question, what if your friends aren’t around, or you don’t actually HAVE any friends?  Well…that’s where you’re going to be a bit let down.

Single player mode is where the problems of Full Auto show themselves in a fashion so thoroughly disturbing you’d think there’s a stage where you have to go to the DMV.  At first, it starts out small–in most stages, the game selects a car for you, and it’s often wildly inappropriate.  Or, at least it seems that way.  Let me describe a situation–they had me in one stage in a warehouse district with lots of corners and sharp turns.  Which car do you think they gave me: the sprightly little two-door sports car, or the longest car in the game, the limousine?

If you answered the sports car, you’ll be feeling about how I felt when I tell you that you’re wrong.

Worse yet, the game also takes choices for weapons selection out of your hands.  I hadn’t run across one stage or one play mode where I could actually decide if I wanted my machine guns fore or aft mounted.  Or if I wanted a cannon instead of missiles.  Or if I…well, you get the idea.

And then, worst of all, I play through a few stages, and I discover something.  The whole thing is starting to get a little, well, monotonous.  I get in my car, I drive down here, I shoot these guys, I cross the finish line, if I didn’t finish well enough I repeat the stage or I advance to the next stage where…I…do it all over again.

It’s a bad sign when a game that starts out so entertaining falls so flat on its face.  Surely they could have at least thrown in some special weapons or something to break up the monotony!  I drove a tow truck at one point called “Hookzilla”.  Did I get to actually USE that hook?  You may rest assured that I did NOT.  Why have a tow truck if you’re just going to forbid access to the hook?  It’s no different from any of the “big cars”!  Why is it even here in the first place??

Maybe I expected too much out of a game that’s essentially just Crazy Taxi on rails with guns.  Maybe I should just enjoy it for what it is, a game that’s fun in small doses and probably a blast with friends.  But at the end of the day, I just didn’t get a whole lot of fun out of it.  And that’s the saddest part of the whole thing.