In the old, golden days, video games where thematically almost exclusively catering for a single target audience: male adolescents. Logically, some fantasy themes were recurrent: saving the earth and all of humanity or even the whole universe. Those were the goals and challenges of tomorrow's family men. Gaming having grown up, yesterday's youths are now confronted with reality. Those old dreams have been tainted as childish and the games industry now also delivers realism into the formerly well kept play rooms of today. One way of doing this apparently involves simulating every single job, no matter how absurd, and also every single every day activity, no matter how trivial, in a game. Resulting in increasingly obscure products in which the original ideas can hardly be recognized anymomre. Though even in the good old days, us heroes had to take a couple of collateral damage hits and, for example, resign ourselves to the role of a simple taxi driver. The implication being boring drives from A to B, where the highlight of the day is exchanging some gossip with the passengers. Unless, of course, it was Space Taxi.
Nothing stolen, nothing gained. While the world was anxiously waiting for the next generation of the Micro Machines series, Ignition came out of nowhere and took pretty much exactly the same line. OK, strictly speaking, they're not toy cars, but you do drive unlikely vehicles across unlikely tracks.
So you're in a school bus (obviously, the coolest choice), plowing right through the jungle, the 'road' leads you right across the top of a pyramid and oops… a boulder dropped down from above and flattened you good. Oh well, no worries – you'll be up and running again in a moment, just that you've lost precious seconds against the competition. So, like Micro Machines, Ignition is good, light-hearted fun racing where you can shove, push or crash as many times as you like – if you think it will be to your advantage.
Almost everybody must have started their motorised career with toy cars, i.e. bigger or smaller models of the real ones. Names like Matchbox, Majorette or Hot Wheels will sound familiar to most. All of these cars come approximately at the same size, approximately that of a matchbox, but still, there are a couple of exceptions, like the Micro Machines: Cars specialising in extreme miniaturisation.
