Game: Twisted Metal III
Platform: PS1
Year Released: 1998



Today I had one of those mornings when I realized about 20 minutes before leaving for work that I hadn’t picked a Throwback Thursday game yet. I scanned my PS1 collection for a game I could play on the PS3 in the office, and realized, “Hey, I haven’t played a Twisted Metal game in a long time”. I thought I had Twisted Metal II, but when I looked through my games, I could only find III and IV. So I grabbed TMIII and came to work really excited to play a Twisted Metal game for the first time in many years.

When the Twisted Metal series first came out, my brothers and I used to spend hours destroying each others’ cars. The first one totally blew my mind, and the second one was even better; you could blow up the Eiffel Tower, for crying out loud! Unfortunately, since it had been so long, the series just got kind of jumbled up in my memories and I couldn’t remember which game was the best and which was the worst. As it turned out, I made the mistake of picking the worst of the PS1 Twisted Metal titles.



In case anyone is unaware, the Twisted Metal series is all about car combat. Players can destroy each other or play a single-player mode in which you go through a series of levels meant to represent different locations all over the world and destroy all of the other vehicles. Different kinds of cars are equipped with different weapons, with plenty of projectiles to pick up in each course. It sounds simple, and it is, but like I said, the first two games were a ton of fun.

It should be noted that it was on Twisted Metal III that 989 Studios took over development duties after SingleTrac split, and they really ran things into the ground. Everything seems okay at first: more cars, more tracks, some unlockables, and your standard forms of gameplay. The story mode is almost identical to that of the previous games, with the player destroying other vehicles in each level in order to eventually advance to the final stage. However, a new physics engine was built for this game that made the whole experience unpleasant.



First of all, the game prided itself on the crazy stunts and explosions that could happen to each car, but these occurrences usually end up being annoyingly over-the-top. For example, bumping even the tiniest of obstacles could cause your car to completely flip over, and the whole driving experience is just not as smooth as it should be. Playing this again felt more like a chore than anything else, and it wasn’t long before I was wondering how I could have been so excited to play this game only hours ago.

The mediocre gameplay is accompanied by some truly awful sound effects. I actually turned the volume down, but I still got a minor headache having to listen to this game. Graphically, though, this game is not bad for a PS1 game. Of course, this game came out in 1998, the same year that Final Fantasy VIII was giving us jaw-droppingly gorgeous cut scenes (for the time), so “not bad” is not much of a compliment. They’re an improvement on the previous games, I will give it that much.

The worst part about Twisted Metal III is the level design. Like I said, some of my most vivid gaming memories as a child are the environments from Twisted Metal II, particularly the France level that lets the players blow up the Eiffel Tower. So how is it that the follow-up delivers such mediocre stages? Some of them are just big squares with a couple of teleports thrown in; others have ramps that lead to nowhere, and some are failed attempts at copying the stages from previous games. It’s just completely underwhelming.



If you’ve got a friend nearby willing to overlook everything wrong with this game, there is always some fun to be had blowing each other up in two-player mode. Actually, one of the best things about this game is that it featured multitap support, a rarity in the PS1 days, so up to four people could play at once. However, the single-player mode is almost painful, so I wouldn’t recommend even trying it.

It’s always a shame to see such a fun series run into the ground, especially so early in its life. There have been several other Twisted Metal games released since this one, but none of them have been particularly memorable for me. It would be nice to see a Twisted Metal game on the PS3 that lives up to its early predecessors; in the meantime, you can just buy Twisted Metal II from the PlayStation Store and relive a childhood filled with car crashes and explosions. Ah, memories.

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