Hot Wheels Rift Rally Turns Your Living Room Into a Video Game
Virtual Reality Gaming
Speaker 1: Here's every kid's dream. Turn your entire house into a Hot Wheels racetrack obstacle course. This is Hot Wheels ripped Rally. It's an RC car, it has a camera, it has augmented reality, and you could drive around the house and do all sorts of things with the camera, with the video game, I'm gonna show you what it's like.
Speaker 1: This whole game system is from Bellon Studios and it's a lot like what you may have seen in Mario Cart live the home circuit game [00:00:30] where you can drive around your house and have it be almost like a video game on the screen. But here they've opened it up to where you can play with iOS devices, the iPhone, the iPad, or the PlayStation. They call this car the chameleon. That's because you can make it be one of 20 different cars and each one of those cars has its own variance. And depending on what kind of model you're picking on the screen, maybe you have a really cool slick car that has a different kind of booster than something else might be harder to drive. It will respond as you're driving, [00:01:00] you'll feel it go faster. It physically goes faster or slows down or turns different ways depending on which model you've picked.
Speaker 1: And it even reacts to virtual cars on the track when you're getting bumped. You don't have to buy multiple cars for a whole family. In fact, you can play a game where you're sitting on the couch passing the controller along and four players can change whatever car they want to have, be their car as they go through a track play enough, you'll be able to even unlock others. Cool. So you can play [00:01:30] by having, uh, different missions to accomplish in your map, different challenges, or you can just have some fun doing stunt driving. So here's one example of a race mode challenge. You're going through your ringing bells under the gate. Those bells are making the dragon mad and it's blowing fire all over the track, but enough talking, it's time to play. I'm not a good driver. Oh, you could change your, uh, car right in the middle of the game too.
Speaker 1: I did a wheelie so the actual [00:02:00] car didn't do a wheelie, but that's the fun of having the augmented reality camera on there cuz it's making it seem like I just did, even though the car on the bottom didn't. You can build the truck however you want. You just gotta plop these down around the house, go around the circuit so it knows where everything is. And what makes it unique this time around is that it can be connected to wifi. So your distance of your track is really just limited to how far your wifi extends. And yes, it works on carpet. It is so much more fun to [00:02:30] buy in ar because of all the, um, sensory reactions. The, you know, the, the tires burning the smoke, the way you crash it must not look very exciting just looking at the footage of it running around the floor, but you feel it more and it's easier to drive when you're looking at the screen than looking at just the RC car zipping around.
Speaker 1: So when this style of gaming was first executed with Mario Cart Live, it was obviously tied to the Nintendo Switch. This really is opened up now to anyone who [00:03:00] wants to play on an iPhone, an iPad, or the PlayStation. You can, you know, have additional controller accessories on your iPhone. You can also just play by touching the screen or using Tilt controls, even a joystick option to drive it around. But of course there's also the PlayStation controller like you would expect. Now there are actually two versions you can buy. There is the version here in White, the chameleon. It starts at about $130 and there is a collector's edition. Uh, this one comes in black and it has a little extra special feature you're gonna be getting with it, [00:03:30] a special die cast car and some features in the game as well. And this one starts at about $150.
Speaker 1: The battery's gonna last about two hours. And, uh, I'm told when you charge it, you can get it back up to speed in an hour of charging. I've been seeing more ways that toy companies are kind of trying to blur the worlds of digital play and physical play. Hot Wheels has done a lot of experimentation in this world and it's always lending itself very perfect to that because who doesn't wanna instantly change their Hot Wheels car [00:04:00] and see how it reacts in real time. So I like the execution of this just from our short demo here today, but we'll have to definitely ticket for a spin for the full version. So stick with CNET to see our full review. In the meantime, let me know in the comments what you, uh, have questions about for this and what your ideal uh, setup would be in the house to have fun with us. Thanks for watching.
