Watch your step, for you’ve just entered theGraveyard. Inside, we’ll be digging up games that have long been without a pulse. You’ll see both good and bad souls unearthed every month as we search through the more… forgotten…parts of history.
The EA Big line of games defined a generation for gamers and led to a slew of games across genres that managed to both encapsulate the extreme sports rise in the ’90s while also cashing in on the rise of tuner culture with games like Need for Speed Underground. While the NBA, NFL and FIFA Street games remain beloved for both casual and hardcore fans of the sports because there’s nothing quite like them now, one game that never got a ton of love in its day or later on was Shox. It was a rally racer of sorts with an arcade sensibility and a lot of tracks and a surprising amount of depth in its core design.
Shox was an unsung gem in its time and is something that I was fortunate enough to grab during a massive $5 Circuit City sale. In addition to getting Rez and Mario Kart: Super Circuit, I got this and enjoyed it – but not to the extent that I wanted to in its day. The PS2 controller was never the best for racing games and even switching things to trigger controls for acceleration and braking never felt as natural as it did on the GC or Xbox pads. Fortunately, playing the game on modern hardware enables Xbox pad usage and some other quality-of-life improvements that change the stakes a bit.
In a nod to the street racing culture that was huge in the early ’00s, Shox has a pink slip system of sorts where you can gamble your in-race winnings on a single chance to get a better car either in your current racing series or jump up through the series races faster by winning a car in another class. As it stands, players will have to grind a bit to get either every vehicle in the compact series to find one they prefer or grind a ton to buy a car outright. The ability to earn money throughout the races acts a bit like the Project Gotham Racing franchise’s kudos system, but with a cash reward that goes towards buying new vehicles.
Shox Zones allow you to earn cash from point A to B and the faster you get there, the more you get with bronze, silver and gold medal-level cash rewards. A gold result might net you north of $1,000, while bronze gets you a few hundred, but it all ends up in the tally at the end with your finishing position and also factors in damage taken. While Shox is a fast-paced racer, you still want to try and race clean and avoid contact because you might get docked $1 or it could be $300 for a collision – so you want to get into the mindset that you can’t hit things much. That’s where placing bolder bets can pay off to get better-performing vehicles and minimize the damage because you’ll have greater control over your steering.
Fast Racing Action
True to form for a rally racer, you have dirt to contend with alongside tarmac and ice, and ice races here are tougher than in a lot of games. Rallisport Challenge 1 and 2 had, for my money, the best ice races because you still had a good sense of traction on the ice and just had to re-adjust your timing to compensate for the slick surface. The time trials were tough and regular races were harder, but manageable and still a lot of fun. Here, you need to avoid collisions on ice because a spinout will result in having to restart the whole race.
We’re used to rewind features in games now, but before the original GRID, it wasn’t something you had to rely on. Fortunately, races can be done in a few minutes, so redoing it’s not the end of the world but I found that it’s better to just finish a race to completion just to get the cash winnings unless it was the first lap. Really, the only fully-safe time you have to make a mistake or be bold with rubbing paint is before the first Shox Zone because there are no penalties beyond maybe getting knocked around a bit – cash doesn’t factor until you finish the first zone. So you can be daring and maybe jump up a few places or even get into the top five quickly if you’re lucky.
Real-Time Playable Replays
Being risky is the key to quicker success because otherwise, Shox has a grind factor to it. You’re usually looking at having to put up six figures to have a chance to win a vehicle and most race payouts are going to be in the $5,000 range on the high end without factoring in pole position winnings. Progression being gated behind either a top overall placement in a series or by spending a bunch of money for a car or risking less money to win a new car is interesting because it ensures that you will eventually get into higher-end races – it will just take time and patience. Realistically, you want to come in first in the series to not only bump your earnings up faster – but also master the courses more. You will be playing courses a few times, so mixing it up by playing the courses in a different order or even with a different vehicle if you have several ones in a single class to work with.
Visually, Shox has held up nicely beyond the usual issues with the PS2 badly being in need of built-in anti-aliasing. Jagged textures aside, it runs at a rock-solid frame rate and winds up delivering some of the fastest racing action on the PS2 and holds up nicely to what the Xbox was able to put out in terms of fast-paced action never bogging things down. Here, you have a lot of dirt flying around and even cutaway cinematics of big jumps that keep you in full control of your vehicle. Those are a blessing and a curse because in a straightaway with no cars, they’re great, but if you’re surrounded it’s easy to lose track of where you are in relation to the track upon landing.
Snowy Carnage
Sonically, Shox works wonders at making collisions feel violent – especially when you’ve got vehicles surrounding you on all sides. The soundtrack has a blend of rock and alternative music included to get the blood pumping and keep it pumping while having even better sound design with a bombastic announcer. It’s something of a feature lost to time, but just like Daytona USA, Shox features an enthusiastic announcer who is more excited than you are to move up a position – let alone hop into first place. It’s surprising how much more this stands out in 2024 than it did then since so few games now have that unless they’re re-releases of arcade classics like Daytona USA 2 or games inspired by it like the Burning Road series.
Nighttime Mayhem
Shox is the kind of game that never got its due in its time and likely won’t ever get a re-release due to licensing. It’s a shame too because replaying it in 2024, I enjoyed it so much more than I did before when the arcade-style racing world was more robust and maybe too crowded to give it its proper love. It’s possible that the branding could be removed from the cars for a re-release, but unlikely. Thankfully, playing it on the PS2 is easy to do with a fairly low complete in box cost. It does run on a CD, though, so you have to make sure your PS2 supports CDs and doesn’t have issues with them. Shox is a fantastic game as a whole and a welcome addition to the Graveyard lineup.
