LEGO Racers for PlayStation 1

Damn near everyone has played with Legos. If you didn't have an insane number of sets, then your neighbor or best friend did. Hell, my Dad loved playing with the things, and the beauty of them was that they allowed you to create different things each time, but usually within their little "worlds". For example, the space scenes were perfect for making ships, moon rovers, and other futuristic craft, while the town sets let you construct little cities. Despite 3DO's PR and marketing attempts, most of us DIDN'T play with army men when we were young, we were too busy building the most fantastic moon base in existence, only to have our little siblings destroy them.
I myself had about five cans of Royal Dansk sugar cookies that were filled to the brim with assorted Lego goodness, so it was with quite a bit of enthusiasm that I popped the CD into my PlayStation and impatiently waited for it to hum to life. What initially hit me was a fantastic CG intro that got me even more excited: perfectly modeled Lego racers burned rubber around tracks that seemed to feature all the essential elements of the Lego world. Everything was there, those great conical trees, slender rectangular bricks for powerups (which by the way, ended up delivering, but more on that later), and a great variety of those lovable Lego people, gunning their way to victory.
Lego Racers takes that childhood fun ingrained in us all, and tries to flesh it out into a digital format. The problem is, even for a kid's game, it's far too shallow to actually pass for 50 bucks worth of plastic disc. Whether this is because of the PlayStation's limited hardware, or an unwillingness to embellish on other parts of the game as much as the car and player design, only God will know. While the create-a-car mode is great (and I do stress great, it's literally like sorting through your Legos to build the perfect racer), the tracks that you're plopped down into are simply bland and are a complete eyesore.
The entire time I was playing this, I tried to keep in mind that this game is aimed at kids, not the older "kids at heart" that might pick it up for nostalgia's sake. Unfortunately, there are some glaring problems that will affect kids, and even more that will stop anyone older than five from playing on. What's worse, the truly detailed (and best parts of the game) are too complex for the intended age group.