YMMV / Carmageddon

• Awesome Music: Plenty of it.
  • One of the most notable songs is "Zero Signal " by Fear Factory, featured both in the first and Reincarnation.
  • Carmageddon II: Carpocalypse Now features songs composed by Sentience and Iron Maiden. "Finer Scale" (the game's theme song), "Pressure Them" and "Be Quick Or Be Dead" especially deserve a special mention.
  • Even though Carmageddon: TDR 2000 wasn't well received by the fanbase, it features some goodies such as "Sick" by Utah Saints (Also featured in Wipeout Fusion, even though using the instrumental version) and "Plastic" by John 5, which fits perfectly when mowing down a crowd of pedestrians if you're feeling sadistic.
• Catharsis Factor: "YOU WASTED 'EM!"
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Due to how unrewarding driving through the checkpoints can be, and how tedious and time-consuming it is to kill all of the pedestrians, you would be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't just stick to wrecking opponents to win races.
• Cult Classic: The series has a large fanbase constantly creating new downloadable cars, tracks, pedestrian models, tools and game mods. The new game is being developed with the help of the fanbase.
• Demonic Spiders: Police cars in the first game, which were seriously better than your own car until the endgame. If one ever decided to chase you, stopping it often took as much time as all your opponents combined.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Suppressor in the first game. It takes forever and ever to beat down in order to steal it, and it's only available for the last few levels anyway, but makes those ridiculously easy if successfully acquired. It's near indestructible, hits like a ton of bricks, and it's even reasonably fast.
  • With the right combination of powerups (or cheats), such as Mega Turbo, Grip-O-Matic Tyres, and Gravity from Jupiter) the car becomes almost lightning-fast, to the point that it is possible to cross an open map in about 3 seconds (and reach speeds of over 900mph!)
  • Also, the Electric Blue. It will instantly zap any nearby pedestrians as you pass by. Great for clearing the entire level of pedestrians. Unfortunately, you can only get it after having completed the game. Or by cheating.
  • The Solid Granite Car powerup. It essentially turns every single hit into a one-hit kill. Stack grip-o-matic tires on that, and you could launch whoever you hit halfway across the map.
  • Screwie Lewie's car/airplane/mole machine, the Twister. Compared to most cars by the time you can get it, it has tremendous durability and speed and better acceleration and handling than it should have, plus it seems the airplane parts help stabilize it so it almost always lands right side up when rolling.
  • The Opponent Repulsificator from the second game if used correctly can bounce cars into walls at high speed.
• Good Bad Bugs: Carmageddon 2's Repulsificator powerup could, almost certainly unintentionally, be the deadliest powerup in the game under the right circumstances. If your opponent was up against a thin support beam (or anything else that's reasonably thin and unbreakable) when you used the spring on them, it would literally tear their car in half as it tried to punch them (since half the car can't go anywhere, the other half does). Very hard to pull off, but an instant kill.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In the PC version, which came out in June 30, 1997, one of the drivers was named Die Anna, which seems harsh considering how Diana, Princess of Wales, would die in... you got it.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The censored version of the first game replaced the human pedestrians in favor of zombies. Then 13 years later, a similar game came out which featured zombies to kill and replaced the racing modes in favor of Twisted Metal-esque arena combat.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "I was in the War!" ^note A quote from the first Carmageddon by an elderly female pedestrian with a walker. The line is actually spoken by a male staff member.
• Polished Port: The mobile version not only is completely free (in-app purchases are only for cheat codes), but the controls are polished for a mobile game and it supports different input methods.
• Porting Disaster:
  • Carmageddon 64, from the makers of Superman 64, no less. The port suffered from poor and blurry graphics, bad framerates, and clunky controls. Worst of all, though, was that it turned all the human pedestrians into green-blooded zombies, completely ruining the game's biggest appeal.
  • Less well-known is the re-issued PC version of the second game from British firm Sold Out Software, which is one of an extreme few of their games which fails to run on Windows XP. Even the patches don't always work.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • There are many vehicles to unlock, some are RiceBurners you'd want to avoid, but some of the best looking machines are dreadful to control for all the wrong reasons. Psycho Pitbull's Towmeister catches on every single sidewalk and curb while going at speed because of its damn shovel on the front. Don Dumpster's The Plow is huge and imposing, but it bounces about like its on 'jelly suspension', despite weighing several tons.
  • The special missions you have to complete in the second game in order to unlock the next tier of races. They completely break the flow of the game and go against the type of gameplay the bulk of the game is. Several of these require you to hunt down targets under a tight time limit while doing precise jumps to get where you need to go.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: The Missions on the second game, which the lead artist admit that they were late additions which he didn't test enough for people that unlike him hadn't become experts - "And so I stand before you, guilty of making a game too challenging for most mere mortals. It's a guilt I'll carry with me to my grave." There are cars that can't be used to clear missions; for instance, the mountain course missions are almost impossible in cars that aren't off-road because those don't have enough grip on slopes and can barely be maneuvered in snow; the snowplow mission can barely be cleared in a slightly smaller vehicle because one's driving against a tank; one has to use a tank-like vehicle to clear the Big Dump, or have the cheat code that solidifies one's car (albeit it's fair to say that the Big Dump can be cleared if they waste themselves).
• So Bad, It's Good: Some cars handle hilariously poorly. Of course, once you master the controls, this can make for some excellent feats of player skill, be it going round corners, or recovering from spinning out. The handling just got better since TDR 2000, however.
• Spiritual Adaptation: As said before, of Death Race 2000.
• That One Boss:
  • Several opponents could qualify, but none seem to get more hate than Carma 2's Jenny Taylia, driver of Jetcar. Despite being among the weakest cars in the game, its awkward shape makes it hard to hit head-on, and hits to the side and back won't do as much damage. While not outright hard to destroy, she certainly eats up a lot of time.
  • For players going for the "Waste All Opponents" victory route, The Splat Pack's Herman Monster can be a real bastard to take down. His vehicles strength is on par with the late game vehicles, which wouldn't be a problem if he weren't among the first group of opponents encountered.
• That One Level:
  • Ramp Rampage. Fifteen laps on an annoying industrial level with several choke-points that tend to get clogged up by the stupid opponents; very little starting time and few conveniently placed pedestrians to run over for more; no good long stretches of road to set up head-on rammings for wasting the opponents; and at least half dozen incredibly annoying cops.
  • Carmageddon 2 featured a lot of these sadly, in order to unlock more maps you had to play unreasonably stupid, boring and annoying levels where you jumped around on roof tops and destroyed satellite dishes, which for many killed the joy of the game, since you only want to play through the first city so many times. Mercifully, there's a cheat code that allows you to skip these.
  • In Cold Blood is another mission that lives in infamy. It requires the player to pass through several checkpoints on the game's snow level within a certain amount of time. Due to the length of the track, the small time limit, and the design of the track, In Cold Blood is sure to send shivers down the spine of any veteran Carma player.
• Values Dissonance: Sure, back in 1997 the original Carmageddon was pretty shocking for its time and became Media Watchdogs go-to game whenever beating the "games turn kids into killers" drum. However, the overall series is known for having a quirky sense of humor, a wacky cast of characters, and a sheer amount of zaniness. As a result, the first Carmageddon game can come across as cartoony and silly by today's standards (especially when you compare it to far more gruesome and horrifying games like Hatred, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, or Manhunt).

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