Lego Racers 2 (PlayStation 2 100%) Walkthrough

Are you sick of Lego racing games yet? Yes, here we go again, this silly old game once more, but this time on a console instead of a computer. Also, it includes me getting everything in the game. Yay. You probably are quite familiar with my general feelings towards this game. I’ll be perfectly honest, I kinda started warming up to it a bit more when I recorded this. I still don’t like it, don’t get me wrong, but I used to outright hate this game , I guess I’ve just been playing too many truly bad games as of late that this really didn’t feel so bad coming back to it. It’s still very flawed, I still think it could have been so much better, but hey, I guess take what you can. This walkthrough, unlike my PC walkthrough, gets *everything* in the game -- all 35 golden bricks and all the bonus minigames. Which also means this walkthrough has a ton of fluff in it, so you may wanna keep your hand on the video slider to skip the boring stuff. I wanted to do something to set this one apart rather than just doing it all over again. In case you care, there is no tangible reward for getting all the golden bricks, you simply get a fireworks show on Sandy Bay. Whoop dee doo. As for the quality of this , it’s virtually one-to-one with the PC version in nearly every aspect, with the only changes being extremely minor. The load times are longer, there is less time spent waiting for the race countdown to start, the minigame vortexes are solid instead of transparent, and the Arctic music was slightly rearranged. Oh, this one also has support for controller that it’s that big of a deal, since the PC version supported force feedback controllers. I’d say it does suffer from a far more inconsistent and weaker frame rate, but to be honest, the PC version was horribly optimized too (sorry people who like this game, it is), so it really isn’t that drastically different. Sandy Bay: I actually really didn’t even need to get everything in one go here, since you intermittently return here whenever you finish a world. That didn’t stop me from getting everything before heading off to Dino Island anyway. Dino Island: This world is such a slog on every angle. The tracks are boring, the music is annoying, and the races go on for an eternity. I’ll also be honest, I thought about hesitating to upgrade my car speed egregiously, , the sooner I could power through this world, the better. At the least, I did decide to go with one steering upgrade too. I didn’t upgrade my shield at any point because car destruction is pretty much a non-issue in this game. Mars: This is pretty much the point where the walkthrough becomes boring due to how much the speed upgrades break this game wide open, arguably even more so than the warp turbo in the first game, since once you have the speed upgrades, there’s no going back. The game is permanently easy from there on out. I don’t have a whole lot to say here. Arctic: Where steering goes to die, and the frame rate has a stroke when there’s a snowfall. I also must apologize, I took one of the worst possible cars for this -- the sail obstructs a ton of your view. Thank goodness it’s the first piece to go when you crash. That, and this world was really hard to play -- my recording setup has me playing the game on a small 9-inch CRT TV with the actual recording going into my computer, and it’s really hard to see an all-white world on such a screen. Also worth stating, the Berg was the only race in the entire game I actually had to retry. Once you get ahead of him it’s smooth sailing (no pun intended), but prior to that you have to be extremely careful with dodging the stalagmites. Easier said than done considering this game has very slippery controls. Xalax: And here we go, the only world in this game I actually enjoy. Every track has variety and stands out from one another, there are actual stage gimmicks, and you aren’t just constantly retreading the same ground. If only the rest of the game ran by this design philosophy. Even if the final race against Rocket Racer is super lame, at least the journey there is worthwhile. After that was finished, I went back to Sandy Bay to show off the fireworks show you get as a reward for all the golden bricks (seriously? They couldn’t come up with anything better?) and ended it there. Hope you enjoy the walkthrough! Since I will be gone for Christmas, this will likely be my final walkthrough of the by extension, the decade. See you all in 2020!