As a game reviewer, I occasionally run into situations that force me to disclose my dirty little secrets. Every gamer has games that they’re ashamed to admit they loved, and just because we’re professionals doesn’t make us any different. Just the other day, Captain Almighty handed me a copy of Hot Wheels Ultimate Racing for the PSP, and I reacted in a way I don’t think he expected – I was kind of excited. It’s no secret around here that I love racing games, but what most people don’t necessarily know is that there was an older Hot Wheels game (Stunt Track Challenge) a few years ago that I thoroughly enjoyed. It’s certainly not Gran Turismo, but it was fun. Luckily, the humiliation I expected from the Captain was quelled by my Senior Editor Christiaan jumping into the conversation and saying that he too enjoyed the game. Sure, the fun of that game may not have been the long-lasting kind, but it was still enjoyable. I had high hopes that the new Ultimate Racing would provide the same experience. I was about to be severely let down.

Hot Wheels Ultimate Racing takes your favorite die-cast toy cars and puts them back into your pocket, probably for the first time in a long time. In this game, you’ll be tackling high-speed tracks with these tiny little cars, hitting jumps and avoiding monsters and obstacles mid-track the whole way as well. On paper, it sounds like a great idea – take cool custom cars and drive them around fantasy type tracks at high speeds. Well, in theory that should make a pretty enjoyable game, but in practice it’s not quite all it could be.

The first, and in my opinion largest, problem with this game is the control scheme. Anyone who’s played a racing game at any time ever should probably be able to guess the basics of any racing game’s controls. The X button is gas, and Square is brake (at least on a Sony system...). In Hot Wheels Ultimate Racing, somebody decided that it would be a good idea to turn that time-tested convention around and throw a wrench into the works of our muscle-memories. In this game, the X button is still gas, but the Square button turns on your nitrous oxide boosters while the Circle button acts as the brake. Essentially, the button that you’ll expect to slow you down has the exact opposite effect you’d expect, and you’ll need to contort your thumb around sideways in order to slow down. By comparison, this is like if Halo 3 came out and used the X button to fire and the trigger to reload. Worse yet, there’s no way to re-map the controls in Ultimate Racing, so you’re stuck with this scheme no matter how much you may not like it.

Fine, so we’ve re-trained our hands to wrap around the poorly thought out button map. Let’s get on to the racing. Pick a mode and get on to the track, and you’ll soon find out that the input scheme is not the only disappointment here. The cars drive as if they’re powered by a single-gear electric motor, although they go through frequent “gear-change” animations where fire spits out of the exhaust pipes. It takes about 5-10 seconds from a dead stop to hit the cars powerband, which basically means that anytime you’re going slow you’re going rrrrreally slow. Get up to top speed and you’ll be going far faster than 300 mph, even though it feels more like 40. I’ve never understood why games artificially enhance the speed of a game just by making the numbers bigger – it simply doesn’t work.

Start racing around the tracks and you’re likely in for more disappointment. The handling of these cars is not very fun. Every car I got into has some severe understeer problems, and that coupled with the strange and difficult brake placement means that you’ll be frequently scraping against the outer walls of turns. The tracks diverge occasionally, giving you a few paths to take through each of the tracks, but often times there’s not really a path that’s clearly faster than the other. You’ll just have to guess. This guesswork is not aided by the fact that the position counter seems to be totally inoperable at times. I was in third place during one race only to pass a car and see my position shift to fifth place. I was nowhere near one of the split areas of the track, so I still have absolutely no idea what was going on there.