We have owned “Hot Wheels Custom Car Designer” for nine months and can honestly say we “tried” to give it a fair test drive. I had no other choice. My son is a Hot Wheels fanatic.

The minimum requirements include a 486/66MHz, 8MB RAM, double-speed CD-ROM drive with Windows 95/98. At the time, we had a 486/66MHz, 24MB RAM, double-speed CD-ROM with Win95, so this is where the initial test drive took place.

The program was unusable. The installation was painfully slow. When we launched the program, we stared at the motto “Hot Wheels Leading the Way” for an eternity and had plenty of time to contemplate… “Leading the Way to WHERE?” I decided it must be to the center of the earth where it promptly burned up, never to return.

The main screen finally came up. Our first stop was in the Customizing Garage which is the reason my son talked me into the software. He wanted to build cars! After another long wait, we entered a rather cool looking 3-D garage. Everything looked self explanatory and intuitive for a young child. He selected a car. The wait was so long we wondered if he would have the opportunity to design a car before he turned 18! (He is 4yo.) Then just as we thought the machine must have locked up, a sort of index card popped up with all the specs of the vehicle he had chosen. What next? There were no prompts. We clicked on the specs card and while the little “wait” icon grinded away for another 10 minutes, we finally give up. Trying to get out of the software was another treat, which took forever. I later played with the software, hoping my attempts in other areas would load something – anything! The few minor features I managed to bring up were not worth the effort and long wait. I never managed to get a vehicle to the lift for designing. I promptly uninstalled it and hid the box hoping my son would forget about it.

Test drive #2 Eight months later….
My son got a new Pentium 133, 32MB RAM, 50X CD-ROM drive for Christmas with enough new software to keep his mind off of “Hot Wheels Custom Car Designer” for a while. As my son is a Hot Wheels enthusiast, I should have realized the inevitable would prevail. “Mom, can we install Hot Wheels on my new computer?” I cringed at the thought, but maybe this little bit of added power would be the burst of flames it needed.

The installation was a little easier to tolerate. Hey, maybe this is a good sign? This time we are able to access all the features, BUT it still was painfully slow, considering we were well exceeding the minimum requirements! This time I decided to roam around and time all the functions. It took 1.5 minutes to load the specs card on a vehicle and then another 1.5 minutes to place the car on the lift. Basically, it took 1.5 minutes to switch to a different feature and .5-1.0 minute to load a selection within the feature. Meanwhile, the CD spins viciously in the drive as if it cannot find the data! I had visions of a little man in there, running and running, out of breath, and hopelessly lost!

Although we saw a major improvement, we were nowhere near cruising yet! What does it take to get this software running the way it should? A 1000MHz machine? Time to look at the trouble-shooting guide to find out if this software is a lost cause. Well… look at this! “If the program runs slow…change your hardware acceleration from FULL to BASIC.” We did this and the difference is unbelievable. It now takes 3-15 seconds to load anything in the program.

Are we happy yet? NO! There are two disturbing features I would like to share. The paint feature only allows the entire vehicle to be filled with the same color! No multi-colored cars produced here! There is no mixing paint either. There are eight colors to choose from - period. This is software to custom design cars! The other feature is in “Victory Lane”. The room has a glass wall looking out to where one would suspect the racetrack to be. My son thought he would be able to click into it and try out his newly designed car. Oops. No, this is not racing software but if they chose to make the scene look this way, the least they could have done was include a test track. Matter of fact, do not read the box too quickly. It says, “Build your own race course complete with grandstands, etc”. I never read this to my son. He just instinctively wanted to follow the pretty 3-D scene out to the racetrack!

Now I suppose some of you would like to know what this program does just in case you feel up to a challenge or have some money to burn. The following is nearly quoted from the box:

The Customizing Garage has 20 Hot Wheels cars to customize with paint, tires (4 styles – wow! Detecting sarcasm here?), engines, spoilers, logos, decals.
The Print Shop allows you to design and print out stickers for your toy cars and track, create business cards, letterheads, newsletters, greeting cards, postcards.
The Department of Motor Vehicles lets you create a pretend driver’s license, license plates, and humorous traffic tickets, and connect to the Hot Wheels internet site.
The Victory Lane is where you can build your own race track complete with grandstands, pennants, and banners, make barricades and buildings for crashing, print out trophies and ribbons. (These are all for printing on heavy paper and using in your non-computer Hot Wheels racetracks)

Sounds great, right? Do not get too excited. It isn’t nearly elaborate as it sounds. The best part is that you can import a real picture to put on the license.

Incidentally, it took five minutes for our one and only print job to get to the printer, which was simply a picture of the newly designed car. I hope that other simple printing is not going to take that long! We are almost afraid to try it!

We picked up “Hot Wheels Custom Car Designer” on a clearance sale for $9.99, which makes me feel a little better when I think of all the struggling required to attain a reasonable level of usability. The big surprise is the distributor – “The Learning Company”, whom I thought had a good reputation for quality software.




Recommended: No