Homie Rollerz

“Nice Game, Shortys. Now Get Your Nalgases off to School!”

“What the heck? What’s a clown doing
on my beach?”
My best attempt at a self-portrait in
the Homies’ art style.

Remember going to the grocery store as a kid, and seeing those gumball machine-style dispensers filled with various candies? You’d pop in a quarter, turn a knob, and receive a handful of sweet treats to tide you over on the car ride back home. I have a distinct memory of getting dragged to a tire store by my mom, standing in the lobby as she took care of her tire-related business, and noticing a dusty old dispenser packed to the brim with ‘Mike and Ike’ fruit chews.** And just as quickly as it caught my eye, I took notice of a little bonus treat inside: A veritable colony of ants scurrying about, presumably left to nest within over the course of years while completely neglected by the store staff. I don’t think I’ve ever gambled on 25¢ candies again since that fateful day, and I have a hunch that a lot of folk reading this can probably share similar experiences. It’s perhaps for this issue with upkeep that most stores eventually stopped filling these machines with candy, and converted them to a newly-emerging vending business model: Cheapo toys contained within plastic capsules, typically with “collectible” marketing hooks attached to them. I reckon some of y’all may know these dispensers better as “gashapon” — a moniker we’ve since inherited from the Japanese, who seemed to be way ahead of us on this vending trend and who generally tend to stock their machines with much nicer novelties for your ¥100—500. And yes, for those of you who didn’t already know: The word “gasha” (an onomatopoeia for the sound the machines make while being cranked) is what eventually inspired the terminology for the “gacha games” that have become a money-sucking plague on the video game industry.

But we’re not here to talk about gacha games — at least not yet, anyway. As it turns out, I wrote that whole rambling tangent to set the stage for a Nintendo DS kart racer! No, it’s not that playing these bad games has made me crazy in the head…^[♫] at least not yet, anyway? Today’s game is a licensed affair, with its source material being perhaps one of the most infamous vending machine toy lines to emerge within the States: David Gonzales’ ‘Homies,’ featuring caricatures of [mostly] Mexican-American peoples emanating from the barrios of Los Angeles. In spite of political divisiveness and attempts by law enforcement to link them to gang culture – resulting in periods of time where they were pulled from retail distribution – Homies endured these public trials on its way to becoming a cultural phenomenon, and ultimately sold through hundreds of millions of its associated plastic figures. Naturally, this opened the door for a variety of crossover media, including the series’ own video game excursion. Which brings us back to today’s main subject: 2008’s release of Homie Rollerz for Nintendo DS, as published by Destineer and developed by Webfoot Technologies. Unfortunately, the Homies’ video game debut would only go on to rate as the second-lowest DS game within Metacritic’s historical aggregate, and continue to carry a reputation as one of the worst kart racing games of all time.

Of course, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover before we can even get into the game itself, as is our obligation here on the Bad Game Hall of Fame. First, we’re gonna have to cover a brief history of the Homies toy line, as well as provide a profile on series creator David Gonzales. We’ll address their appeal to Chicano culture, some of the franchise’s controversies, and several of the other spin-offs seen on its way to getting a video game adaptation. We’ll also provide some background history on the game’s developer Webfoot Technologies, plus publisher Destineer. Then and only then can we address the Homie Rollerz game within its necessary context, and get to settling whether or not it’s truly worthy of its repugnant reputation. Is it possible that – much like the toy line that spawned it – it’s simply misunderstood outside of its target demographics? Could there have been a concerted effort by critics to keep it down, motivated solely by its licensed nature and claimed “glorification” of negative stereotypes? Does a gringo like me have any business at all talking about this highly contentious and deeply cultural subject matter?*** All I can say to all that is: I promise to give Homie Rollerz as fair a shake as is possible, and to speak on the broader franchise with the best understanding of it I can gather for myself. Let’s get to rollin’, folks.

** For the record: Mike and Ikes actually rule. They’re probably a candy you never think to buy while you’re browsing the snack aisle, but hot damn if they don’t pair well with a motion picture show and a bucket of popcorn. On my list of “candies I only think to buy at the movie theater;” I’d rate them way above Junior Mints, slightly ahead of Raisinets, but a notch below my beloved Sno-Caps.

*** At the risk of sounding like a stereotypical white, and for whatever it may be worth: My Latinx girlfriend will be serving as a consultant on this article, and checking my work to ensure that I’m not speaking out of turn or inadvertently misconstruing any of the key details where it comes to the culture. I’m genuinely trying to approach this subject from as fair and measured a perspective as possible, and hoping to avoid all the pitfalls which other non-Latinx game reviewers seemed to stumble headfirst into back in the day. And believe you me: We’ll be covering a few of those unfortunate reviews in time.

“They Say That the Love of Money Is the Root of All Evil.”

“Ugh! Did you just walk out of a bad 70s movie?”
Photo of David Gonzales alongside one of his illustrated characters, from the book
Homies: A David Gonzales Retrospective.

The story of the Homies begins with their creator, David Gonzales: A California-born Mexican-American, and cartoonist from the time he was in high school. With regards to his career as an artist; he quickly established a distinct style for himself (defined by slightly exaggerated proportions, hyper detailed line-work, and novel fashion choices), found unique inspiration in caricaturing friends and family from his own neighborhood, and rapidly developed a business acumen that would serve him well in the decades to follow. His first comic strip debuting in his teenage years was ‘Trips del Chico-Loco’ (‘The Adventures of Chico Loco’),^[1] which depicted life within the impoverished barrios that he called home — featuring a cast which represented the range of the “cholo” subculture, and including a self-insert character dubbed ‘Hollywood’ who stood out for his impossibly cool demeanor and impeccable zoot suits. Described by Gonzales as a businessman with “a very substantial income” and a collection of “custom lowrider cars” in which he drives around town, it’s obvious that Hollywood serves as a bit of personal wish-fulfillment on the part of David (as well as it being a real-life nickname of his, originally bestowed upon him by his friend Pancho Dominguez)^[1b] — an aspiration and goal which he hoped to achieve one day through his own business dealings. Of course, Gonzales also made sure to point out that Hollywood would always strive to support his neighborhood, and that he’d remain ready and willing to “do anything for his homies.”

Eventually, the comic came to center around Hollywood as its central character; prompting a change of title to ‘Adventure of Hollywood,‘ and later to be known simply as ‘The Home-Boys.‘^[1c] It’s also at around this point that David had begun attending the California College of the Arts, started marketing himself more effectively, and eventually managed to catch the attention of the prolific Lowrider Magazine. The publication picked up Home-Boys as a monthly feature, and would showcase Gonzales’ designs to an audience of not just automobile enthusiasts, but also to a contingent of Chicanos who could personally relate to the characters and lifestyles documented in the strip. The fact of the matter is, the United States has historically always been hostile to its Hispanic and Latinx populace — criminalizing the very act of being brown in America, and cultivating depictions of them in popular media / the news cycle as perpetually poor and inherently violent. And of course, those same industries would be stacked against them in such a way as to prevent their own perspectives and voices from being seen and heard — to ensure that the status quo remained intact, and that minorities “knew their place” in the so-called “land of opportunity.” Bearing all this in mind, a comic the likes of Home-Boys was poised to appeal to a largely underrepresented demographic, and a quite large demographic at that. It served to provide [debatably] positive representation for an oft-vilified subset of readers, develop characterization beyond one-dimensional archetypes; and on a meta-level, to demonstrate the potential for Chicano people to find success in fields not traditionally open / advertised to them, as David himself was able to achieve in pursuing his art.

If I’m potentially overstating the significance and impact of the original Home-Boys strip, it’s perhaps due in part to Gonzales’ mythologizing of his own career — a retrospective right granted to him by how genuinely massive his Homies toy line would eventually become. Where it comes to The Home-Boys, I’d contend that its prospective reach was severely hampered by Lowrider’s own publishing woes; such as when the publication was discontinued for a period between 1985 and 1989, due to issues stemming from a brand acquisition by their former printing company.^[2] David briefly returned to illustrate for the magazine in its early 90s revival, penning a new strip titled ‘The Rainbow Club’ (so named for its newly multi-racial cast of characters),^[1d] but Gonzales’ aspirations were quickly outgrowing the scope of the hobbyist periodical. This eventually led to his taking a hiatus from his comics in order to focus full-time on merchandising his characters – now officially under the ‘Homies’ branding (due to the ‘Home-Boys’ trademark being held by a company in the UK) – depicting them on t-shirts and all other manner of apparel. It also gave David an opportunity to explore other mediums and products which he could potentially profit from; including the likes of posters, stickers, and temporary tattoos. While all these offerings seemed to prove varying degrees of profitable, the venture which would ultimately lead to his greatest success came with his learning the toy-making trade, and ultimately producing designs for miniature figures based on the characters from his comics and merchandise.

“What’s better to spend money on than me?”
The original set of Homies figures.

The opportunity to design toys first presented itself to David while in the process of renewing a license for his sticker designs, which had represented his first foray into vending machine distribution. He penned an agreement with a new producer / distributor in A&A Global Industries, whose catalogue spanned a full range of wholesale goods. One such product A&A were peddling were known as “sky-divers” — classic army men figures with parachutes attached to their heads, which could be thrown into the air and watched as they slowly descended back down to the ground. David was pitched the concept of creating Homies-themed plastic figures under this gimmick, which he acknowledged “sounded pretty strange to [him],”^[1e] but which he eventually accepted the proposal for. He digitally rendered a set of five characters which A&A could reinterpret as figure moulds, and eventually gave his approval to their final designs. And so it came to pass that in 1998, Gonzales launched his first run of Homies figures, distributed primarily by means of supermarket vending machines. And despite a lack of advertising on the distributor’s part, the success was immediate: Vendors were reporting to the company that “machines [were] being emptied at a rate never before seen.” A&A soon discovered that most consumers would almost immediately unscrew the hooks for the parachutes from the figures, and treat them more as collectibles than as playthings. This led to the parachute gimmick being quickly scrapped, and revised figures being sold without any unnecessary attachments (as well as adding a sixth character to the initial set). The end result? Two million Homies toys were sold within just the first six months of the product line launching.

The appeal of the figures – as was previously seen with the success of David’s original comics and apparel designs – came down to the fact that they were truly novel in who and what they represented. Again, to speak frankly: Mexican-Americans in the 1990s simply didn’t have much in the way of relatable representation in popular media and toys — nothing that spoke for the lifestyles of the lower class, at the very least. You basically would’ve had your choice between mocking bandito caricatures straight out of the 19th century, or “idealized” A.C. Slater-types written by [and mostly for] white folk. And then out of nowhere came the Homies: Dressed in top-buttoned shirts, proudly sporting trimmed moustaches, and rocking headbands and beanies. It spoke to a truth of life in the barrios — a depiction of peoples and fashions its intended consumers would’ve been deeply familiar with, between their families and neighbors. For some, it was a rare opportunity to own a figure modeled seemingly after themselves. And as the line continued in releasing new sets of characters over time, the ground covered only grew wider: Male and female, young and old, the newly affluent and the long-impoverished. Folk could find themselves in athletes, cooks, musicians — even in disabled individuals; and yes, as well as in characters who were clearly implied to represent for [unspecified] street gangs. Naturally, that last bit is the one that news media and government officials would hyper-fixate on, and use to attempt to paint the entirety of the toy line as “promoting a criminal lifestyle” to youths.

By measure of Los Angeles law enforcement officers, the entire range of Homies figures were meant to represent gang members; as they attempted to qualify baggy pants and top-buttoned shirts as gang attire, and deliberately misconstrued characters crying actual tear drops as having tattoos on their faces. As part of a Los Angeles Times article on the then-contemporary controversy, a detective for the LAPD would be quoted as saying “We’re trying to fight and teach kids to stay away from gangs, and we have to contend with this as well?”^[3] Deputy district attorney Michael Jesic went so far as to claim that “We’re thinking of putting them up in court and saying: ‘if you’re dressed like these guys, you’re violating probation,’” in what has to be one of the most blatantly racist quotes I’ve had to transcribe on this website. To be clear though, it wasn’t just police and judiciary folk who took issue with the toys: Helen Hernandez, the president / founder of the Imagen Foundation – an organization dedicated to making statements on portrayals of Latinos in the entertainment industry – would contend that the Homies represented offensive depictions of their people: “They are negative images. They perpetuate stereotypes. […] I believe in creative freedom, but I also believe in social responsibility.” The article even goes so far as to interview a nine year old boy, who upon seeing an example of the figure responded by exclaiming “They’re cool! They’re gangsters. Can I have this one?” David did his best when questioned to argue that he wasn’t “trying to push any negative lifestyle,” and that he “keeps [his] Homie characters violence-free and drug-free” — adding his observation that “usually the people throwing rocks are on the outside looking in. They don’t understand our culture.”

Still, Gonzales’ initial pleas to the press did little to mitigate the damage being done by such articles and media coverage. This would lead to a persistent issue for the remainder of Homies’ distribution run, wherein various retailers would be pressured to pull Homies from sale in their stores at different points in time. The first reported instance of this came shortly after the publishing of that aforementioned LA Times article, where a Los Angeles-centric supermarket chain declared that they would stop offering them at their locations.^[4] Later pushes to block Homies from public consumption saw the likes of Giant and Safeway pulling Homies vending machines from nearly two hundred stores in Spring of 2002. At a certain point, David realized that simply providing quotes to the press and reiterating his same handful of talking points wasn’t doing him any good, which led to a personal policy of outright refusing interviews on the subject of Homies in the years to follow (as well as instructing spokespeople from A&A to do the same). Instead, David would fight back against criticisms with a unique new strategy: Heavily promoting the Homies’ official website, and packing it to the brim with messaging that presented the figures as being positive role models and pillars of their communities.

Heading over to the Homies.tv webpage (which is still in operation, despite not having updated since 2010) will allow you to access a range of paragraph long character bios for all the assorted figures. Worried that ‘Big Loco’ is an intimidating gang type? Turns out that was only in his past, as he’s now a youth counselor who runs a “Homies Outreach program.” A final line seems to serve to criticize the critics, claiming that “If you have ever seen a Chicano youth counselor, you will know that this is exactly what one looks like.” Did you think that ‘Eightball’ might’ve earned his moniker by slangin’ cocaine? Nah, it’s just because he likes painting the number eight on his shoes, you silly goose. Furthermore, his personality is described as “happy but cool,” whatever that means. For all these books that shouldn’t be judged by their covers, Gonzales would eventually develop a handful of certified active gang members as characters, such as the imposing ‘Oso.’ And in his particular case, his description reads less like a bio and more like a statement to the press: “While the intent is to handle any gang activity sensitively, gangs are a part of the barrio and will have a presence. […] Through the story lines we want to educate the public about the difference between hardcore gangsters and the Homies overall. It would be an opportunity to use these characters that do exist in our communities in situations where we can get an anti-gang message across to our young viewers.” Ultimately, the introductions of these backstories and disclaimers seemed to serve its role as a positive press initiative, and the Homies would soon make their triumphant return to many of the big chain retailers… or so goes the theory presented by Gonzales. If you ask me, it was just a simple matter of stores being unable to resist an ever-increasing revenue stream.

“That’s it, Homies. Let’s get rolling.”
A ‘58 Chevy Impala from the
Homie Rollerz toy line.

Homies’ continuing, unprecedented success would lead to further licensing and merchandising, to the point where Gonzales could effectively dabble in any venture and be guaranteed to turn a profit. And even in the rare event that one of his new endeavors flopped, the safety net afforded to him by the sales of his original 50¢ figures meant that he wouldn’t have to sweat over his missteps. To name just a few of his attempted spin-offs, focusing specifically on the figure market: There were ‘The Palermos,’ which attempted to market to an Italian-American market with mafioso caricatures (pulled largely from The Godfather and The Sopranos), while contending that the characters were all just innocently involved in a legitimate restaurant business. A ‘Trailer Park’ line of redneck-type stereotypes served to “celebrate” America’s white trash, with such flattering depictions as the perpetually drunk ‘Kegger Kenny’ and the shit-stained sewage worker ‘Doo-Doo-Dan.’ The ‘County Dogpound’ series centered on intimidating canines, attempted to draw parallels between prison life and animal shelters, and went so far as to give its pooches jewelry and tattoos. If it sounds like we’re headed off the deep end here, we can rein things back in with the ‘Mijos’ series; which re-focused on depictions of Chicano youths, and set them on adventures with life lessons to impart onto similarly-young consumers. Mijos seemed to be a particular passion project for Gonzales, who modeled its primary characters after his own children, and expanded the property into the likes of its own comic strips and Scholastic-published books.

Of course, none of these spin-offs held a candle to the cavalcade of merchandising around the original Homies. Between trading cards, lunch boxes, commemorative tins and branded energy drinks; there was no piece of kitsch that Gonzales wouldn’t approve of having his Homies printed on and sold at mark-up. Have you ever thought about how you’d love to see ‘Lady Joker’ and ‘Shygirl’ in skimpy beach attire? The ‘Homiegirl Swimsuit’ calendar series (hilariously misspelled as “Homiergirl” in graphics on the Homies website) has your particular brand of horniness covered.** Ever wondered how the Homies would approach hosting a sketch comedy show? Tune in to The Homies Hip-Hop Show on LATV; boasting the absolute cheapest in stop-motion animation, the most hackneyed reality television parodies this side of Mad TV, and humor derived almost entirely from the sort of negative stereotyping and judging by appearance that David originally claimed to want to combat. (That, and lots of jokes at the expense of the LGBTQ community.) If we wanna talk about some actually sensible attempts at branching out from the vending machine figures, though, you can look to the ‘Homie Rollerz’ toy line: 1/64th scale replicas of customized classic cars, packaged with pairs of Homies figures, and sold directly off of store shelves [rather than the vending machine model]. This would probably represent the most successful translation of the Homies into another toy format, as it narrowed its focus on a popular aspect of Chicano culture (appreciation for modified and/or vintage vehicles), and served as a logical extension / accessory to the original figures. This particular line’s popularity would of course be noted by Gonzales and company, and leveraged in the near future.

If there was one market though that David seemed to struggle in establishing a presence in, it would seem to have been video games. Gonzales had filed for the presumptive trademark on a licensed tie-in game as early as in the first half of the 1990s (at a point in time where he secured trademark registrations across multiple different mediums, including “everything from tees and toys to video games and animation”),^[1f] and he would spend the better part of the next decade attempting to seek a publisher willing to partner with him — getting turned down by seemingly every major label and studio along the way, even with the Homies at the peak of their popularity. While it’s easy to attribute this corporate sheepishness to not wanting to be perceived as profiting off of stereotypes, there’s perhaps a less scrupulous explanation for their hesitance: Video games aren’t typically intended to appeal to specific racial demographics, with marketing generally preferring to sell them to as large [and generalized] an audience as possible. As such, Homies’ perceived lack of interest outside of Hispanic / Latinx populations likely concerned publishers, and scared them off of investing in such an endeavor. And so, the struggle would persist over the course of years; until a new market within the games industry emerged, and brought with it lower costs of investment and reduced financial risk. This brings us to the Homies’ video game debut: Homies: Dominoes ‘n Dice, released for Java-enabled mobile devices in 2006, as published by the company Starwave Mobile and developed by Humagade.

Dominoes ‘n Dice would seem to represent a fairly generic collection of domino and dice-related gambling games, in which you can wager your in-game currency on your winning said gambles. Your accumulated cash can be spent on customizing your avatar (a new Homie character created for the game named ‘Chameleon’), or simply on ever-increasing stakes. All said, it seems like an inegregious enough application of the Homies license, as it draws its inspiration from games that are traditionally played as a part of street culture. That being said, I can’t actually speak to how well the game plays or presents itself, seeing as I personally lack access to said game. Where a large number of Java / J2ME games are fairly well-archived online, Dominoes ‘n Dice has seemed to evade such collections, as well as providing precious little evidence of its ever having been released at all. About the only proof of its existence is a review penned by Levi Buchanan for IGN, in which the verdict is rendered that it’s a “well-produced game (save for the irritating story scene text) full of character and personality,” and that the package deal comprising multiple different variants of domino and dice games makes for “a tremendous value.”^[5] Surprisingly high praise, considering the era. Unfortunately, not even David Gonzales himself seems to remember / be aware of the game’s existence, as it is not mentioned so much as once in his Homies retrospective book or anywhere on the Homies.tv website. Goes to show how much mind was ultimately paid to the “disposable” mobile games of the era, I suppose.

What is mentioned (albeit off-handedly) in Gonzales’ Homies book is a “lucrative video game deal […] with EA Sports for both Homies and Mijos,”^[1g] which evidently didn’t get far enough in production to so much as warrant an public announcement / press release — let alone materialize into a finished product. If I had to speculate as to what sport(s) these title(s) would’ve centered on and when they may have been in development: Despite there being multiple examples of skateboarding and billiards-playing Homie characters, I’m more keen to lean toward basketball as the most likely contender for a focused sports game? It has its ties to street culture, some precedent as appearing in the comics and toy line, and generally makes the most sense as a sport the Homies could presumably engage in within a video game. Let’s just say that I can’t imagine Electronic Arts investing all that much into a “Homies Bar Room Pool” game, or attempting another cartoon-license skateboarding title so soon after The Simpsons Skateboarding. As for the Mijos, I can envision them either being slotted into something like baseball or soccer — perhaps even getting their own party game-style compilation of minigames modeled after a variety of different sports? In any case, we can only speculate so much with regards to games that appear to have never actually entered into development. What can be confirmed is that Gonzales continued to shop around for a prospective publisher, and eventually managed to find one in Destineer Inc.:

“We have been courting videogames companies for years…trying to find the right fit and the company with enough faith in the project to make the idea happen. Destineer was that group. Once we decided we would work together…we came up with the Homie Rollerz for Nintendo DS as a first project and look forward to more.” ~ David Gonzales, Homies creator^[6]

Destineer was originally established in 2001, by a former ‘Executive Vice President’ for Bungie in Peter Tamte. The company had at different points been a development team, a publishing label, a holding company for various acquired IPs, and different combinations and permutations of all the above. To say that their ten-year period of operation was turbulent would appear to be an understatement: They began with efforts in porting Windows games to MacOS computers, originally published under their Bold Games sub-label. At a point in 2003, they bought the company MacSoft in order to reconsolidate their MacOS publishing under that more recognizable branding. During this period, they further expanded into publishing for other platforms as well, after acquiring Atomic Games in 2005 and using them as another outlet for game development. Also in 2005, Destineer would publish one of their first major media license adaptations: A first-person shooter take on Starship Troopers, releasing exclusively on Windows PCs. Despite that title not being particularly well-received, it would still open the door for them to take on other licensed properties; including Fullmetal Alchemist, a series of John Deere video games, and eventually Gonzales’ Homies. But by this point, Destineer were focusing more on publishing than active development, and as such would seek contractor studios in order to handle the business of producing these titles for their label.

In the case of their Homies tie-in game, Destineer would settle on Webfoot Technologies: A studio with its own history dating back to 1993. They had also operated as a publisher for a time, acquiring and distributing a range of [primarily] DOS-driven titles. Through the classic shareware model, they’d offer freely available demos / samples of software in their catalogue, and compel folk to purchase the full games if their interest was peaked. Such was the method used to market and sell 1996’s action-puzzler Deadly Rooms of Death — a title originally developed by one Erik Hermansen, and one in particular which seemed to help the company to more firmly establish itself within the industry. By 1997 though, the landscape had begun to favor supporting Windows over DOS, and Webfoot promptly pivoted as needed; beginning to develop their own games, and primarily marketing titles with the word “3D” in the title. Such software includes 3D Alien Invasion, 3D Frog Frenzy, 3D Maze Man… yeah, you probably get the picture by now: They were lifting classic arcade game premises, recreating them in 3D for personal computers (likely on the cheap), and selling them under generic names so as to avoid the lawyers ringing them. But hey, it was a hustle that was paying off for them, especially in the case of their successful 1999 release 3D Pinball Express: A collection of four 3D-rendered (actually 2.5D) pinball tables, which I distinctly remember seeing on office supply stores’ shelves well into the early aughts, and which seems to be fondly remembered by many to this day.

Interesting note with regards to that last title: It was actually published by the prolific Cosmi Corporation, who I remember most fondly for their Forbidden Forest duology, released between 1983 and 1985. For those unaware, they’re a pair of classic Commodore 64 [and Atari 8-bit] action-horror games; exceptional for their graphical presentation, unsettling use of sound and music, and gory death animations. But did you know there was actually a late third installment in the series? I sure didn’t, until I discovered that Cosmi had handed the reins over to Webfoot to co-develop it in 2003. And now having played Forbidden Forest ’03 for myself… Well, let’s just say that I’m content to keep calling the series a “duology,” and pretend that this last entry never happened. It looks like a game that Webfoot would’ve developed years earlier as part of that primitive ‘3D’ line-up, and has the feel of a game you’d expect to see on a horrid “1000 Games in 1” compilation disc. Truly dire stuff, and capturing precious little of what made the C64 installments so legendary. At least it comes packaged with emulatable versions of those original two entries in the series, which may very well have been worth the CD-ROM’s budget price all on their own. One of our Twitter followers (@farfromsleep) also clued me in to the fact that Cosmi and Webfoot collaborated again that same year, in order to produce a third installment in the Super Huey series. And honestly… I just don’t have it in me to subject myself to that one right now.

Getting back on track here: Webfoot are probably best known to most for their series of five Dragon Ball games on the Game Boy Advance, marking their entry into major media license adaptations. They kicked things off with Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku in 2002 – an action RPG covering the events of the Saiyan and Frieza sagas – before following it up with a sequel in 2003 (The Legacy of Goku II, covering the Android / Cell sagas), and closing it out with a third entry in 2004 (Buu’s Fury) in order to wrap up the remaining story of the anime [at the time]. Along the way, they also developed a rather risible fighting game in Dragon Ball Z: Taiketsu, and a more straightforward beat ‘em up in Dragon Ball GT: Transformation. At the same time as they were hitting this licensing hot streak, they were also raking it in off the backs of adaptations for American Girl, Hello Kitty, My Little Pony and Tonka — three examples of popular toy lines, one might note. While it’s hard to contend that any of these games are particularly exceptional, they at least seem to rise to the level of serviceable, which is typically deemed “good enough” when it comes to licensed fare for the twelve and under crowd. And it’s perhaps thanks to this portfolio that Webfoot were offered (or decided to make a bid for) the potentially lucrative Homies license, having sufficiently proved that they were up to the task of it.

Typical of a licensed handheld game, there’s not much in the way of available information on Homie Rollerz‘ internal development. What can be kept track of is the game’s mentions in the gaming press, which there were in fact quite a few of! You get the impression that Destineer were genuinely committed to producing and promoting this game at the start, and that they likely had expectations it would go on to move units for them. And so, the game was first announced on August 14th, 2007; promising touchscreen utilization in custom-painting and modifying your rides, talking up its eight-person local multiplayer and four-player online play capabilities, and promoting a November release date for that same year.^[7] Homie Rollerz would get dedicated booth space at PAX later in August (hosted at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center), where previewers took note of its “unique ‘lean’ mechanic that works not quite like anything we’ve seen before in a DS game.”^[8] At the same time, they expressed confusion over the fact that you’re able to perform flips while in mid-air, noting frustrated instances in which they “accidentally tapped a should button when going over a jump only to find our cart was somehow capable of spinning itself upside down mid-air, delaying us for several seconds. Perhaps this was intentional, but it comes across as clumsy, and doesn’t appear to make a whole lot of sense, even within the exaggerated physics of Homie’s world.” Perhaps most damningly though, they hone in on the fact that the available demo seemed to suffer from lacklustre visuals and performance, which they hoped Destineer and Webfoot would be able to remedy before launch:

“Unfortunately, while Homie Rollerz currently contains the fundamentals of what made Mario Kart a great game, it also lacks the polish necessary to deliver a compelling gameplay experience. Right off the bat, we were disappointed by the blocky environments and generally drab worlds, which don’t quite do justice to the brand’s unique, colorful art style. Despite this, the visuals would be tolerable if the frame rate weren’t so lackluster. Perhaps we’re just acclimated to Mario Kart DS‘s rock solid 60 frames-per-second, but Rollerz comes across as more of an interactive slideshow than a truly fluid racing game.” ~ Andre Segers, IGN^[8b]

Destineer and Webfoot must’ve been paying close attention to the reception to their demonstration, and a call seemed to have been made on the spot: The game would be subsequently delayed, in order to afford it more time to be developed fully. The news of this new itinerary first broke in December (2007), with new promises the game would now be releasing in January.^[9] From the small assortment of screenshots provided to press between PAX and this point, you can observe very slight changes being made to the game’s UI elements at around this point, and what I discern to be some reductions in texture / model detail across the racers — possible concessions in attempting to up the game’s framerate from its earlier showing? It’s hard to say any of this for sure, as there’s almost no video footage of this earlier demo build in action, save for what precious little can be seen in this two-minute video interview held at PAX as part of coverage by Gamervision.com. (Be sure to watch for the part where Destineer’s booth attendant awkwardly claims the game as being “the first ever video game that’s targeted at a Hispanic audience.”) What can be said for certain is that Homie Rollerz would also wind up missing that newly-slated January release window, for reasons unspecified by the publisher or by press. All that could be gathered was that come January 22nd, 2008, Destineer had sent out a fresh press release to announce their new February release date — a rather minimal delay, all things told.^[10] And at least it seemed as though the publisher was doing their best to keep the title alive in the bylines, by continuing to issue these announcements and attempting to drive pre-orders at GameStop and EB Games.

Unfortunately, one thing Destineer had been neglecting to effectively do in this time was to actually advertise the game across magazines and television — a major promotional opportunity they seemed to completely fail to capitalize on. Not one print ad for the game would ever appear in the pages of Nintendo Power – let alone other contemporary games publications – and no commercial spots were ever produced to air on television. Instead, the sole bit of printed promotion the game would seem to benefit from was a three-panel comic strip illustrated by Gonzales for Lowrider Magazine, whose core readership were likely well outside of the key demographic for Nintendo DS game consumption. And in the video department, there was an attempt made by the studio behind The Homies Hip-Hop Show to produce a promotional trailer: A two-minute short completely unfit for TV (in terms of its over-long runtime and hideously cheap production), and featuring no gameplay footage whatsoever. In a truly bizarre move, said trailer goes out of its way to imply that those who hadn’t pre-ordered the game would struggle to find it on store shelves — that the lines for the game at the likes of Best Buy (hilariously parodied as “Best Guy”) would be untenable, and that the average consumer would be better served waiting for the imagined initial furor around the release to die down! About the only positive thing that could be said about this absolutely baffling / self-defeating commercial spot is the fact that precious few people would’ve likely ever seen it, considering how poorly Destineer were handling marketing across the board. For the best, perhaps, if this sorry web video represented the best they had on offer.

As a final blow to the game’s chances at receiving any significant attention around its debut: Destineer only went and delayed the game’s launch once more – without telling anyone, this time – and finally wound up releasing it on March 5th, 2008. This effectively guaranteed that Nintendo Power wouldn’t give it the time of day, for just one example outlet. When Homie Rollerz missed its seemingly finalized February window (and evidently neglected to send out review copies of the game in the process), the magazine’s editors promptly banished it to their purgatory for unreviewed releases, as many other gaming publications seemed to follow suit in doing. It’s in scenarios such as this where delays can legitimately damage the perception and exposure of a game — in dealing with titles which don’t have the benefit of major publishers and marketing pushes, which aren’t particularly hyped up to begin with, and which rely on the “kindness” of the press to get the word out about. Without the benefit of that promotion, all that could be hoped for was that Homies fans would visit their local game stores on a whim, recognize the characters on the game’s cover out of the collective corners of their eyes, and feel so compelled to buy the cartridge based on that brand recognition alone. And maybe if they wound up digging it, they’d go on to recommend it to their friends? Of course, that last bit is contingent on one key factor: The game would have to be good.

** I didn’t want to mention this in the main text, but there’s another page on the Homies.tv website that is genuinely so embarrassing it’ll likely negatively color the way you think about David Gonzales for the rest of time. Enter ‘Hollywood’s Black Book’: A series of photoshops wherein Gonzales’ self-insert character is seen fondling a variety of popular actresses, with the implication being that Hollywood has slept with all of them at some point in time. I don’t even know where to begin with this, honestly, so I’m not even going to bother to try.

“I’ve Already Been Tricked by a Witch, Why Should I Trust a Wizard?”

“Even illegal alien lifeforms are allowed
to enter my race.”
North American box art.

‘Quién Sabe’: A town whose name translates from Spanish to English as “Who knows?”, serving as an effective “Any Street USA” for a seemingly unassuming East Los Angeles barrio. But there’s something quite spectacular that resides within this modest neighborhood — a magical secret, unknown even by many of its longest-term inhabitants. A “wise ol’ Vato” by the name of Wizard – whose residence in said town has been rumored to be centuries-long – is no less than an actual true-to-life wizard, capable of granting wishes to the truly deserving. In order to be deemed a worthy recipient of his magic fulfillment though, there is first a trial that one must endure: Placing first in a series of eleven street races as part of the ‘Wizard Circuit,’ spanning what seems to be the length of the globe itself — into the far reaches of outer space, even! And so, the gauntlet is thrown down, as ten determined contestants vie for that most grand of prizes. Will the Wizard’s promises prove true? Only the most skilled street racer will discover the truth for themselves.

To put that plot synopsis into other words: A wish-granting wizard serves as the flimsy excuse for a series of fantastical races, as competed in by a small collection of familiar Homies™ characters (with eight available from the start, and two as further unlockables). Curiously, the criteria for who makes the cut on this roster of racers has little to do with the central characters of the original comic or broader Homies universe, and more ostensibly serves to represent “the ten most popular Homies” — the supposed top-selling figures in the toy line. Now, while I can’t claim to have access to the same sales data that may have been available to the team at Webfoot, I’m willing to wager that popularity probably had little to actually do with the selection process: It’s fairly obvious that the finalized line-up was more determined by a want to represent as many demographics as possible, and open up the game’s potential appeal to a broader audience. While that sounds like a fine idea on paper, you have to remember that Homies entire selling point was its portrayals of a mostly Mexican-American population; and that even in the pursuit of that focus, there was still an ever-present contention with regards to negative stereotyping. As such, when it came time for Gonzales to depict characters of other racial identities in the line… Well, let’s just say that “sensitivity” and “nuanced portrayals” weren’t always the headliners on his list of design priorities.**

To list off the characters in the order they appear on the selection screen: There’s Mac Daddy – the game’s sole African-American character – who sports an afro, carries a golden chalice at all times, and wishes for a whole bunch of money. Next up is El Chilote, an anthropomorphic pepper made up as a Zapata-era revolutionary, who aspires to end the sale and exploitation of chiles by “gringo fast food chains and grocery stores.” Third in line is Hollywood’s girlfriend Gata serving as the token female character, who dreams of opening her own chain of fashion boutiques. Big Loco simply seeks to bring an end to the violence in his neighborhood, by building a community center for troubled youths. The motorcycle-riding Big Red (the game’s sole white character) begins the game wanting to demonstrate the supremacy of “Grade-A all-American Choppers,” but ultimately winds up wishing to go back in time to hang out with vikings? Willie G selflessly uses his wish not to restore his own ability to walk (an injury he incurred during his former gang lifestyle, and which he describes as “paying for my life of crime”), but to heal a similar crippling done to his friend Victor at the hands of a reckless driver. An enigmatic jester Jokawild*** tires of life in Las Vegas, and seeks to open a casino “smack dab in the middle of the Barrio,” where he will presumably further devastate their economy. Last up is the zombified Homie known as Zombie (clever naming, I know), who wishes to return to his living form and exact revenge on the bruja (witch) who initially cursed him.

After beating the game as all eight of these initially available racers, you’ll unlock Gonzales’ own self-insert Hollywood to play as, who simply desires to “prove [he] still has what it takes to win.” On winning the tournament, he simply asks Wizard to pass his wish onto “the next Homie you see that’s down on his luck.” This will finally unlock the game’s tenth driver, Alien Ese; who was at one point banished from his home planet Chupar, and now wishes to be returned home. What’s odd to me here is how the game relies on the likes of re-animated corpses, talking peppers, and extraterrestrial beings to fill out its roster; seemingly before even considering the likes of a second female character, Asian or Native American representation, or fairly obvious choices in profession-centric characters who’d open the door for more unique vehicles (such as firemen, food truck operators, or even a cop)? Bear in mind that when I say this, these are all archetypes which are represented and accounted for within the original toy line, for as admittedly unsubtle / unflattering as some of said depictions may be. The point I’m trying to make here is, if representation was the goal, then commit to that direction! If it’s really about figure popularity, then go with whatever the top-selling toys actually were, which I can practically guarantee the likes of Big Red didn’t rank within. That’s just the realities of market demographics, y’all.

In any event, the characters we have are the characters we get. Theoretically, there are meant to be statistical differences between them (or more accurately, their accompanying vehicles), which can be adjusted by taking their rides to the ‘Garage’ in order to change out a small number of car parts. We’ll get into more detail on that aspect in time, but the thing to note here is that customization isn’t free: It requires exchanging ‘Respect Points,’ serving as the game’s [per-character] currency, and earned during the races themselves. You can also bet a percentage of your points (up to a maximum of 10%) on winning one-on-one races in the ‘Challenge’ mode, if you fancy yourself lucky. And so, the intended gameplay loop becomes clear: Choose a Homie, challenge the race tracks on a one-by-one basis, save up and spend points on upgrades, and ultimately complete the competition as your character before repeating the whole process again as the next driver on the list. With the Wizard Circuit spanning eleven tracks / races, and each necessitating a first place win in order to progress to the next, you can reasonably expect that you’ll be getting a decent amount of playability out of this humble thirty dollar cartridge. Of course, that all depends on how enjoyable the actual aspect of racing gameplay is, doesn’t it? We’ll, let’s get into that straight away, then!

… Of course, it’d probably behoove us to consult the game’s ‘Tutorial’ first, to see if there’s any advice worth taking heed of. Homie Rollerz presents its tutorial as a straightforward series of dialogue windows, as delivered by Wizard on your bottom screen while his portrait stands against a brick wall on the top. And while it may not cut to in-game demonstrations of his tips / explanations in action (or give you the opportunity to test out techniques for yourself), it still does provide some handy information. You’ll get explanations for the basic controls, the game’s progression system, and even individual breakdowns of all the items you can pick up and use mid-race. In example, it is explained that the ‘Confuser Juice’ item – which is definitely NOT a weaponized alcoholic beverage (as that would bump up the game’s ESRB rating from an E to at least a T) – acts sort of like Mario Kart‘s ‘Lightning,’ in that it temporarily impedes the driving abilities of every other racer on the track for a precious few seconds. But perhaps the most vital tip you can take away from the tutorial is that it behooves you to perform ‘Tricks’ during races, in order to fill out a boost meter (as well as earn extra respect points). This’ll clue you in to the fact that your L and R buttons allow you to lean your vehicle in those associated directions, as well as the ability to hop your car off the ground by pressing them both simultaneously. What it fails to mention though is how absolutely vital these inputs become over the course of the circuit, and that they can’t be ignored if you’re looking to make any serious progress.

With all that out of the way, it’s off to the races! After selecting a character for the first time, you’ll start with zero respect points and little else to choose from other than the Wizard Circuit option, where each Homie is made to tackle the full set of tracks in their own character-specific order. Bearing in mind that you have to place in first in order to unlock the next course for your chosen racer to drive on, this will almost invariably lead to a scenario in which your first several races will likely consist of the same first track over and over again; accumulating a small pittance of respect for every loss you’ll notch, as you initially struggle to get a handle on the game’s controls and mechanics. Eventually, you’ll likely assume that you must’ve chosen a character with particularly poor handling, as you begin to notice how much speed you lose the moment you so much as tap left or right on the D-pad — not to mention the fact that your steering is super sensitive, to the point of constantly overshooting corners and narrow roads. Then suddenly, the moment of realization hits you: This is how every character is going to play. This is how the entire game controls. And so, we reach the point when most folk will feel justified in writing the whole game off as “nearly impossible to beat” — in taking the developers to task for “not bothering to make sure kids could actually make progress in the game”^[11] and so on and so forth.

Honestly? I’m hard-pressed to blame folk for waving the proverbial flag so early when it comes to Homie Rollerz: Controls in a kart racer are expected to be immediately intuitive, to the point where even a gaming novice should be able to figure out the basics and tackle a simple track within minutes of picking up a controller. Unfortunately, Homie Rollerz has several factors working against its first-time players — the least of which being the fact that there’s no gradual escalation in track complexity / difficulty, considering the fact that every character gets a seemingly random circuit sequence assigned to them. I think the biggest issue most folk will take notice of is the fact that your AI opponents seem entirely impeccable as drivers: Always managing to find the perfect lines through a track, seemingly unaffected by most hazards, and able to tackle turns with a degree of ease and grace simply not afforded to you as a player. It makes your own efforts at keeping up seem completely futile at first, as your computer-controlled rivals seem to hit top speed the moment they leave the starting line and manage to maintain that advantage the whole way through the rest of the race. Even if you find yourself able to rise from eighth place to a more respectable position, all it takes is a single errant turn or bump against a wall to completely destroy your momentum, and to send you stumbling to the back of the pack with seemingly no hope for recovery. It’s pretty well discouraging, to put it mildly.

So, what can be done here? How can one overcome the seemingly impossible handicaps placed on your vehicle, and beat out your consummate computer-controlled competition? Well, to start with, you’ll need to come to the realization that Homie Rollerz is not Mario Kart – not exactly, anyway – and should not be attempted to be played as such. Perhaps most vitally, you’ll need to come to grips with how you’re intended to leverage the L and R buttons, and to observe the fact that hopping doesn’t allow you to drift — that drifting is actually absent entirely from this game about street racing. In its place, you have your leaning, which the game only bothers to describe in its tutorial as a flashy flourish for the sake of building up to a speed boost. In actual execution though, it contributes almost nothing to your on-screen nitrous meter, and so you might write it off as pointless at first blush. But as it turns out, what leaning is good for is serving as your go-to input for steering and turning; where its slight tilt allows you to more deftly handle corners, and as it can also be paired with left and right on the D-pad in order to mitigate the loss of speed when tackling sharper bends. In almost every single instance in the game where you’ll want to turn, you will most likely benefit from entering into a lean first, and tapping the D-pad afterward to make further adjustments as necessary. This one relatively simple technique will improve your lap times dramatically, and put you in contention to actually start winning races just on its own! I get the impression that most game reviewers completely missed out on this mechanic, somehow? I dunno: It came pretty intuitively to me after just one or two races.

So, if you can’t hop your vehicle to enter into drifts, what’s even the point of having the option to hop then? Well, there’s actually a couple: For starters, you’ll notice lots of ramps across the tracks, typically leading you toward item boxes suspended in the air. If you don’t hop as you near the edge of the ramp, you’ll never reach those necessary heights in order to grab them, and you might even find yourself careening headfirst into ledges instead of clearing the presented gaps. But perhaps even more importantly than that, rapid hopping will build up your boost meter like nothing else in the game — allowing you to fill it up from zero to one hundred percent in roughly three seconds flat. This means that you can (and should) always be bunny hopping down straightaways, and be able to boost constantly across every lap [between the boost pads on the road and your own ability to trigger them at will]. With this tactic in mind, you can easily make up whatever distance may lie between you and first place at any given point in a race, and keep yourself near the head of the pack. Just be sure not to boost when you’re jumping off ramps, since that will usually end with you flying completely out of bounds — as if the developers somehow never considered the idea that players might hit those jumps at top speed? Oh, and don’t bother using L and R to attempt to perform tricks while in mid-air either, as whatever extra boost power it might net you is negligible at best.

The last major piece of the puzzle comes down to learning the tracks, and figuring out where the vital shortcuts lie. Across most stages, the computer opponents will completely ignore these alternate paths; leaving you to have to discover them for yourself, but also ensuring that you won’t have to deal with other racers attempting to muscle you out of them. Not all shortcuts are created equal, however: Where some can save you as much as tens of seconds (the ‘Hollywood Hills’ can be largely bypassed by means of a path that cuts directly through its titular hills), others will actually wind up taking you longer than just staying on the more-traveled paths (two different shortcuts in ‘Fiesta Village’ seem to waste more time than they save). Some stages wind up not having shortcuts at all (such as the ‘New York’ course)… at least, nothing the developers deliberately intended for. But more on that later. In any case, getting a handle on these three basic elements – leaning, hopping, and shortcut-taking – is really all it takes to have a fair shot at winning races, and getting a solid feel for controlling your given vehicle. This is before you even begin to customize your car and improve your statistics, which actually winds up being something you never actually need to do, if you should either wind up forgetting or simply can’t be bothered to.

In the event you wind up accumulating enough respect points to afford some of the pricy customizations at the garage, there’s a fairly limited set of upgrades available to you. The key options are categorized under ‘Engine,’ ‘Tires,’ ‘Hydraulics,’ and ‘Style’ (for vehicle accessories); as well as a ‘Paint’ category comprising some purely cosmetic choices. Each component you can purchase carries different alterations to statistics described as ‘Top Speed,’ ‘Acceleration,’ ‘Weight,’ ‘Handling,’ and ‘Trick’ (presumably meant to determine how much boost power you accrue for performing said tricks during a race). Some parts serve as pure increases to a given stat, while others might detract from one while adding to others. While that all sounds well and good on paper, here’s the thing: Absolutely none of these tweaks are perceivable when you actually take your modified vehicle back onto the road. Whatever effect they might have – assuming they’re actually properly programmed to impart any difference at all – is so minimal as to be completely pointless. I’m seriously not sure that the meters indicating the different levels for each stat aren’t just entirely for show, as I could never determine any tangible difference in feel across any of the different vehicles on offer in the game, let alone the differences that should theoretically come with either increasing or decreasing any of their respective stats. And so, the only customizations that seem to have any observable change on your vehicle wind up being the cosmetic ones — the small handful of ornaments and paint jobs. These at least make for visible changes to your vehicle’s model and texturing, though I’d argue that they’re generally on the “gaudier” side of aesthetics. Oh, and it should be noted that the paint options all just apply a pre-drawn coat of coloration to your car: Nothing in the way of implied custom design by way of spray-painting with the stylus, as the game’s marketing may have inadvertently implied.

You may notice I didn’t mention the items and weapons you’ll pick up over the course of a race as figuring into a winning strategy. That’s because they’re honestly not that much of a factor, especially as you begin to consistently pull ahead of your competition across races. For one thing, Homie Rollerz does abide by the Mario Kart rule of holding back its most powerful items for drivers who are falling behind, to where first and second place typically only get ineffective projectiles and traps they can deploy; such as a basketball which acts similarly to a green koopa shell, slippery ‘Oil Slicks’ (whose icon on the HUD is a bomb, for some reason?), and ‘Brick Walls’ you can drop behind you to make narrow passages that much tighter. If you should happen to lag past third, you’ll start seeing a handful of more effective equalizers: The aforementioned Confuser Juice, fireworks that hone in on whoever’s in front of you (which oddly goes unmentioned in the tutorial), and a lightning rod which electrocutes and slows down anyone unfortunate to pass by you (also completely forgotten in the tutorial). And if you’re unfortunate enough to fall all the way into last place, there’s a rare chance you might pick up a weapon meant to represent the character Smiley (whose grinning face already adorns all the item boxes), who will fly out ahead of you and briefly attempt to sabotage everyone else. Aside from those, you can find a ‘Camouflage’ item that renders you briefly invulnerable to that aforementioned assortment of attacks, as well as a ‘Car Switcher’ that immediately swaps your position with whoever’s next in position ahead of you. What you won’t find waiting for you in any of the item boxes are boost items and speed-ups, likely due to the fact you can so easily generate your own boost power.

All told, the available arsenal makes for a pretty lacklustre array — a totally ignorable suite of items you’ll likely elect to stop collecting once you’re consistently able to lead in first, and which you will rarely even be on the receiving end of due to the close distance they often require in order to be effective. Even in cases where the computer might use the Confuser Juice or Smiley against you, they seem to have far less effect on you than they do the other computer-controlled drivers, possibly serving as a balancing measure? In example: Where the juice causes your opponents to immediately spin out on the spot, its effect on you is reduced to some temporary impairment placed on your steering. Also, I get the impression that the computer might be programmed to not drop brick walls, since I never seemed to see any on the tracks that I myself hadn’t deployed? In either case, it’s a bit of a bummer when a cartoon kart racer can’t be bothered to pack appropriately cartoonish items with it — to provide players with a means of upsetting the status quo and mounting come-from-behind victories. Part of the whole appeal of kart racers is their lending themselves to a sort of “party game” vibe, where even an unskilled player can still cause chaos for everyone else and capitalize on it in order to turn a race around. Sure, it can lead to some frustrations when a precious first place position is liable to slip from your hands at the drop of a hat, but it should be satisfying in equal measure to be the one to screw someone else out of a win at the very last second! Instead, Homie Rollerz seems afraid to do anything that might deliberately impede its players’ driving abilities, or otherwise surprise them with anything similarly unpredictable. I guess Webfoot figured that players might already have their hands full contending with the game’s most truly dangerous hazard on a persistent basis: Themselves.

In spite of all the advantages you’re given over your opponents, the single disadvantage of “human error” can be enough to equalize the whole balance. Whether you find yourself accidentally clipping a corner, mistiming a jump, hitting a hazard, or otherwise deviating from your intended route; the seconds it can take to correct yourself and get back on the horse can be brutal. It’s not that reversing is particularly slow, so much as the fact that collisions will often toss you around in unpredictable directions that can’t always be accounted for — if not sending you flying outside of bounds entirely. There’s something particularly wonky about the collision physics in Homie Rollerz that leads to your getting completely turned around and mixed up on crashes, and which even makes clipping through the world a pretty frequent risk. At its worst, the game is liable to fling into no-man’s-lands where you’re somehow not immediately registered as out of bounds, and left to figure out which direction you need to drive in before getting warped back to the main road. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find it amusing whenever it happened to me, but I don’t reckon it’s favorable when it comes to rating “functionality” or what have you.

There’s one other possible frustration you may find yourself running into… or, perhaps more accurately, driving at a tilted angle into. That would be uneven level terrain, which Homie Rollerz relies heavily on across several of its tracks. Now, in any other kart racer, this is pretty much par for the course: Uphills, downhills, and bumpy roads can all test a player’s ability to manage speed and trajectory in different ways; as well as giving different courses distinct feels from one another, as they get further away from the doldrums of the standard “flat” track. The thing about those other games, though, is that they don’t typically account for racers landing anywhere other than flat on their wheels. At most, a kart racing game might measure a vehicle’s three-dimensional rotation on the Y-axis, in order to determine whether an airborne vehicle is heading toward the ground with either its front or rear tires landing first (or not on its tires at all, as the case may be). As such, most kart racers don’t really seem to bother to account for Z-axis rotation – in which a three-dimensional object is spun without affecting the forward direction or vertical angle it is made to face – as it adds an entire pesky dimension for the game [and for players] to have to keep track of. But of course, Homie Rollerz has those leaning mechanics we talked about, as well as the ability to fully rotate your vehicle across that same axis while in mid-air as one of the “tricks” you can perform — by using the same buttons you’d use for leaning, no less! Perhaps you can already picture the problems that might arise from holding down the L or R buttons while driving across uneven terrain?

If my explanation there was a bit too wordy, let me break it down more simply: When you’re on the ground, L and R do just fine for tilting your car to either side as a means of better negotiating turns. And when you’re up in the air, it’s intuitive enough to use those same shoulder buttons in order to flip your vehicle horizontally in mid-air — effectively cartwheeling your kart, so to speak. But the problem lies in what happens when you unexpectedly transition from flat ground to airborne, as you either hit bumpy terrain or briefly fly off the end of an upward angle. Because the second your wheels lift off the ground, those lean buttons immediately serve the purpose of rotating your car ass-over-teakettle, as if it assumes you wanna try to go for a full rotation with your less than half-second of airtime. In effect, not leveling out your vehicle before approaching a bump / jump means you’ll most likely land without your wheels pointed toward the ground, leaving you to land on your comically-oversized head instead. And when you do, the game doesn’t just transition into some canned animation for your racer eating shit (think of the tumbling animation from Mario Kart 64): It instead treats your vehicle like a physics object, and leaves you to helplessly watch as your vehicle trips and falls over itself for agonizing seconds, before seeming to arbitrarily decide when it’s time to reset you back upright. Other times, you might fly far enough to hit a wall with your wheels pointed toward it, and the game will suddenly decide to snap to it as if it were the ground — “correcting” you in such a way as to leave you completely confused.

The underlying issue here, by my estimation, is that the game doesn’t differentiate between its deliberate ramps and the impromptu ones presented by the terrain. The impression I get from most driving games is that crafted ramps often have special properties assigned to them within a given game’s code; in order to ensure that players can be properly primed to score stunt bonuses, provide a bit of unseen assistance in clearing gaps, or simply so that the game’s camera can snap to cinematic angles. It’s a component that most players probably don’t notice when it’s implemented seamlessly, but which becomes incredibly conspicuous with its absence. Whether by design or by oversight, Homie Rollerz doesn’t make that distinction between those different surfaces that might cause lift-off, and the unfortunate result can be the frequent inadvertent flipping over of your vehicle. If you’ll remember, this is the same issue which IGN’s preview team honed in on at that 2007 PAX demonstration – in that quote about finding their karts “somehow capable of spinning itself upside down mid-air”^[8c] – and I get the distinct impression that the mechanic only went on to frustrate a number of later players and reviewers in the final product. It’s a shame too, because the track designs themselves make up a genuinely novel lot, held back mostly by similar careless design choices.

For as “cartoonish” as the Homies (in their original toy format) are often described as being, I believe that’s a somewhat erroneous read of them: For the most part, they really are quite grounded in their backgrounds, circumstances, and the settings they inhabit. Barring the talking pepper and the alien, this cast of characters has always been made to inhabit real-life cities (or approximations of them, at the very least), and I honestly wouldn’t have been surprised to see Homie Rollerz simply present a series of stages that took place exclusively across the likes of urban streets and beach boardwalks. To be clear, the game certainly does present its fair share of those sorts of familiar environments: Across the bridges of New York City, to the pier at ‘Homies Beach,’ stopping for a quick trip across Tokyo’s rooftops (and over the head of a knock-off Godzilla), and allowing you visit to Homies’ own hometown of ‘Varrio Quein Sabe.’ I reckon you could also include the ‘Hollywood Hills’ and ‘L.A. Stormways’ among that lot, as they also represent other fairly grounded environments for street racing. The primary issue with these courses in my mind isn’t that they’re less “inspired” than some of the later ones, so much as that they fail to populate their streets with traffic outside of the racing competitors. Any of these tracks would’ve been made so much more interesting by having to contend with other incoming and outgoing cars, like a ‘Toad’s Turnpike’ or what have you.

Believe me when I say that the game gets creative across the remainder of its five stages: You’ll traverse an ‘Aztec Temple’ complete with comical rolling boulders and crushing stone walls, as well as a variety of vertical drops and 90° corners. It’s certainly the most complex track in the game, and probably my personal favorite to boot. A visit to ‘Fiesta Village’ presents a cliffside pueblo centered around an oversized spinning piñata, which you’ll have to figure out how to ride under or over. The ‘Homie Clown Circus’ is a fantastical big top complete with canons and a “globe of death” (which you can actually inadvertently find yourself trapped within), broken up briefly by a boring bit of Nevada desert that wraps back around to the inside of the tent. A simply titled ‘Haunted House’ provides a bunch of great Día de Muertos decorations and trappings, as well as the inspired decision to repurpose gravestones as small ramps. And finally, there’s the craggy surface of ‘Planet Chupar,’ which sadly fails to leverage low gravity in making itself a particular stand-out. It does let you traverse through a wormhole though at a certain point, which routinely spits you back out on the other side of it with almost no control over your vehicle as you immediately enter into a turn — or perhaps more accurately, enter headfirst into a wall placed straight in front of you.

All told, there’s certainly a variety to the tracks on display, but the quality of almost all their designs still leaves something to be desired. The presence of boost pads across the tracks can range all the way from “sensibly-placed” to “completely ill-advised,” as some seem dead-set on shooting you off directly into out-of-bounds territory. And considering the fact that the game seems entirely averse to guardrails and fencing along the perimeters of any of its roads, there’s often precious little to stop you from veering off-course or over unprotected ledges. At the same time, other courses can feel downright claustrophobic with their looming walls and miniature scale. While that’s obviously part of the territory where it comes to providing a variety of tracks, Webfoot just never seems to get a firm grasp for either approach, and I was often just left feeling like different stages were somehow pulled from completely different kart racers? At the very least, there is one unifying element across the lot of them: Every track can be very easily broken, by means of a couple of very simple tricks. As a matter of fact, you might very well be able to figure these exploits out for yourself, as I incidentally (if not accidentally, at first) managed to over the course of my own race attempts.

The first exploit I have to try to explain isn’t exclusive to Homie Rollerz, as it’s one that has also been possible within the likes of the Mario Kart franchise and countless other racing games (with varying approaches and degrees of ease): It’s the ability to trick the game into thinking you’ve completed full laps by activating checkpoints closer to the finish line out of sequence, and effectively bypassing large swathes of the track in the process. To maximize the potential of this in Homie Rollerz, you can reverse at the start of a race while the rest of your opponents speed off ahead of you, drive outside the course at a particular angle, and trigger the out-of-bounds detection at the same moment you drive past the coordinates of the starting gate. If done correctly, the game will reset your car immediately in front of the finish line, believing that you’ve already circled the full length of the course and are ready to score a lap. Repeat this process three consecutive times, and the game will summarily reward you with a first place win — assuming you can manage the whole trick quicker than it takes the computer-controlled racers to run the track legitimately. Once you get a feel for how to fool the checkpointing system on a given track, you can start clocking full course completion times under the twenty second mark, on courses that would typically take upwards of a full minute per lap! The two easiest stages for pulling this off are the Aztec Temple and Homies Beach, where you can simply drive off the unguarded sides of the road right before the finish line and get placed right where you want to be.

Not every track though makes it so easy to get out of bounds. For those pesky courses where you’re not given the open space to do what you need to do, you’ll need to rely on a second exploit: The ability to climb completely over walls by driving headfirst into them and mashing the hop button, which will routinely send you flying into the air and over the edges of the map. And yes, this trick does feel more unique to Homie Rollerz, for how easily accomplished and handily exploitable it proves. While you can use this trick to explore “behind the scenes” of the courses and generally mess around with boundary breaking, its most practical use is most certainly in conjunction with the previous checkpoint trick, so that you can score some more of those impossible times and clear the whole game in short order if you should ever have the need to. I certainly don’t mind telling y’all that after clearing all the courses legitimately with my first character pick (Gata) – which took the better part of an hour to accomplish – I happily used these exploits in order to clear the game with all the remaining Homies as quickly as I could. Where it would’ve potentially taken me five or six hours to repeat the races as the nine other characters [knowing the tracks better by that point], I was plenty content to knock the entire rest of the game out in just another hour and a half, and spare myself from that particular tedium.

There’s really only a couple things to note about completing the game as all the provided Homies: Where I swear there’s no discernible differences between any of them as racers, they do all come equipped with a small handful of unique cutscenes and character dialogues, which is probably one of the most interesting (if not criminally underutilized) aspects of the whole game. I did find myself oddly curious to find out how each of the characters’ wishes might be fulfilled — if the Wizard would pull some Thaddeus Blinn shit on them, and turn some of their more selfish wishes against them (he doesn’t). When I realized that every character also has an interaction with one of the other racers (occurring somewhere around the fifth course), I was similarly compelled to find out how all those would play out and who they would occur between. In example: When Alien Ese meets El Chilote, he initially mistakes him for another alien, to which El Chilote responds by roasting the unfortunate name of Alien’s home planet (“Your planet sucks! That’s why they call it Chupar!”). Willie G taunting Big Red for not wanting to get his bike wet in the stormways track is another good bit of character dynamic, that gives an impression of how poorly some of these characters might get along even outside of the racing circuit. And then there’s Big Loco threatening to teach Mac Daddy a “lesson about helping the hood, instead of customizing it,” which is uhhh… well, let’s just call it “unfortunate,” and leave it at that. Despite the sketchiness of that last interaction, I really do believe that there should’ve been more of these scenes written, so that every character could have the chance to interact with one another at least once over the course of their stories.

In addition to every character having their own unique ending illustration depicting the fulfillment of their wishes, completing the game as them also unlocks an apparently superior-grade vehicle for them, which completely replaces their previous kart and whatever upgrades may have been purchased for it. There’s no way of switching back to your original vehicle if you should feel so compelled to further customize it or compare the differences, and no way to see what the supposedly improved stats on these replacement vehicles might even be. As a matter of fact, these new vehicles can’t be customized at all, as Wizard will inform you that “Nothing in the garage can compare to the hardware you’ve got now” and block you from so much as entering the shop. This means that whatever respect points you’ve accumulated for that character are also completely worthless at this point, as there’s nothing left to spend them on and no reason to wager them in the Challenge mode. It indicates to me a frankly surprising bit of short-sightedness on the part of Webfoot, to assume that players would have no attachment to their previously customized vehicles or a want to get under the hoods of their new ones. I dunno: I just can’t help but think that all the marketing around the premise of “Trick Out and Roll Out” kind of feels like a lie, when it’s clearly such an entirely inconsequential aspect of the game.

Speaking of promises that Destineer and Webfoot couldn’t live up to: There’s a multiplayer mode in Homie Rollerz! Where it can in fact support up to eight players through multi-card play (meaning every player has their own copy of the game on-hand) and four through the ‘DS Download Play’ functionality, what’s missing here is the originally intended online play over ‘Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection’ — a feature which had been seen to extend the lifespan of Mario Kart DS for several years past its release. Now, where we can probably pretty safely assume that an online component in Homie Rollerz would’ve likely been short-lived (if not dead on arrival) in either case, it’s still a big feature to have been lacking by this point in the Nintendo DS’ history. So, “locals only” it is then, as you may attempt to corral your friends [within 30 to 100 feet of you] into joining your lobby for some street racing action. In this mode, you as the host can take your customized / unlocked vehicles from the single-player mode into your choice of the available courses (all eleven if every player owns the game, but only three if you have folk bumming off of your copy), where other copy-owning players can presumably bring in their own vehicles as well. Naturally, a player without their own copy of the game won’t be given any choice of character / kart at all, as they’re randomly assigned one of the other unchosen racers to inhabit — really serving to further demonstrate how absolutely interchangeable all of them actually are.

From here, you’re effectively left to just run the standard races, with nothing in the way of options to be tweaked or unique ‘Battle Modes’ to mix things up any. Perhaps most frustratingly, there’s no way to get rid of computer-controlled racers on the road, to where you and your friends can’t just have the tracks to yourself: Each player that joins simply takes the place of one of the AI-controlled drivers, with however many unoccupied slots going right back to the computer. In effect, if you’re playing with a friend who isn’t as intimately familiar with the mechanics of the game as you may [or may not] be, you can routinely expect them to get stuck in the eighth place doldrums as the rest of the Homies zoom past them — ensuring the worst possible impression of the game for DS Download players who might be on the fence about buying their own copies. At the very least, the rest of the game seems to function as intended, for better or for worse. All the single-player exploits still work, so you’re free to either teach them to your friends or endlessly torture them with your secret knowledge. All in all, I just can’t imagine many folk getting much mileage out of this game mode, or organizing any further “Homie Rollerz marathons” after trying the multiplayer out just once or twice.

Honestly, I can see how the casual consumer wouldn’t get much mileage out of Homie Rollerz’ single-player content either. For the whole package’s original $29.99 manufacturer-suggested retail price, it’s a game fairly scant on content and low in replayability, without any hooks to sink into you and compel you to take it to LAN parties or wherever else other DS-playing folk may congregate. Just about the only entertainment I got out of it personally was the precious few bits of character interaction, and figuring out how to bust the game wide open. Played as it was likely intended, it’s just not a particularly engaging racer, as the difficulty is entirely uneven and the tracks are generally quick to master. I’ll also note here that it ain’t much of a looker in terms of visual presentation: Where the framerate is at least largely consistent, it’s only a consistent twenty frames per second. At the risk of invoking Mario Kart’s name for the umpteenth time, Mario Kart DS runs at a solid sixty FPS, and manages to do it while looking way more graphically impressive in the process! The Homies as they are rendered in the game are stiff, low-detailed, and with a bare minimum of polygons; which would almost be fitting in with the original capsule toys, if the game had actually made an attempt at centering a cohesive style around that concept. Instead, the generally drab [and inconsistently-scaled] tracks sometimes feature sprite-based pedestrians standing on the sides of the roads – copies of David Gonzales’ original illustrated designs – who stand in remarkably stark contrast to your 3D-rendered racers. I realize too now that I’ve barely even alluded to the bottom touchscreen up to this point, which is primarily used during races to provide a zoomed-in overview of the map (as well as the final times at the end). No options to zoom further in or out, or to access different perspectives of the course: What you see is what you get, and it’s not something particularly worth looking at in the first place.

I reckon the last category to address here is the game’s sound design, or near lack there-of. Not once will you hear any of the characters given voice, which seriously detracts from any semblance of personality the game might’ve been attempting to impart. Not only that, but the game seems to lack in most of its expected sound effects as well, rarely pairing with the on-screen action or providing cues as to items currently in play on the field. At the very least, each course does have its own unique musical track, though the quality of composition and instrumentation can vary. At the very least, it’s not just a dozen different variations on “La Cucaracha” or “El Jarabe Tapatío,” as one might briefly fear given the ‘Music and Sound Effects’ credit to an Australian composer in Yannis Brown.**** If you ask me, Homie Rollerz probably would’ve been the sort of game to benefit from a full licensed soundtrack, in aiming for the oddly “gritty” feel I’m guessing it was going for — where it’s certainly not cartoonish enough to be called “cartoony.” Just so long as they would’ve had the restraint not to include WAR’s “Low Rider” as a part of the digital jukebox, it’d have probably been a neat little novelty for Homie Rollerz to have on offer, even if it wouldn’t have been the only Nintendo DS game to go that extra mile (such as in the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series’ DS entries). Really, I’m looking for anything at this point to inject a bit of much-needed flavor into the game — to give it some sort of unique identity.

When it comes to the kart racing subgenre, Mario Kart will always be king, and every kart racer to release in its wake will always be seen as “copies” — derivatives found to be cribbing their notes from the design bible that Nintendo wrote nearly thirty years ago. And that’s fine! There’s still plenty of room for other games to exist within the genre, even as the titles most widely considered to be the best in class are still largely perceived as rip-offs and riffs on the original. As such, the thing a post-Mario kart racer truly lives and dies by is its identity — the personality it presents to players, and the charms of its associated characters and setting. Without a uniquely identifiable theming to set it apart, a kart racer is effectively worthless. And so, a developer can theoretically develop the perfect kart racing game in terms of mechanics – something that shows up even Mario Kart itself in terms of playability – but I still reckon that nobody will ever actually play it if it doesn’t stand out for some aspect of its aesthetic. For all its controversies, Homies represents a license with plenty of possibilities for gaming; between its identifiable characters, distinctive tone, and connection to a heritage and culture ripe for representation in games. And yet, Homie Rollerz fails to capitalize on any of that immense potential, outside of simply rendering a small handful of figures as playable characters. To me, that is honestly the game’s most egregious failing, more so than any of its technical flaws.

It’s easy enough to point out where Homie Rollerz could be tightened up in terms of mechanics, but perhaps a measure harder to figure out how Webfoot could’ve more effectively utilized the license in order to present a more memorable experience and fleshed-out world. Having consumed enough Homies content in the past month of writing to believe that I better understand what it was that Gonzales had originally sought to present to the world with his comics, my own pitch would go something like this: Ditch the whole Wizard Circuit and other fantastical elements, and focus in on the core of the street racing. Drop the cartoon pretense entirely outside of the art style (which should certainly be highlighted and designed in tune with), and treat the whole thing more seriously with actual money on the line and ways to spend it. Have players alternate between races and participating in lowrider showcases with their vehicle(s) of choice, where the customizable hydraulics and fancy ornaments can be demonstrated in the capacity of impressing crowds and earning a reputation for yourself. Have the end goal for the game be to prove yourself the best driver / mechanic / showman on the streets, and further have players defend that crown against whatever challengers may come their way. Top all this off with a handful of minigames (whether they be car-related or not), customization for your chosen Homie themselves (as seen in Dominoes ‘n Dice), and swap out the generic item pick-ups for a more grounded set of deployable hazards — less in the way of “confuser juice” and more in the way of oil slicks, spike strips, and molotov cocktails. I’m not advising to go full-on 187 Ride or Die here with racers firing guns at each other, but to at least do something with the item pick-ups that isn’t just another tired riff on the Mario Kart arsenal.

Now, would all those ideas probably bump the game up to a ‘T for Teens’ rating at minimum? Almost certainly. But hey, that’s probably along the lines of how I’d age rate the original toy line as well, if such a classification system existed. Perhaps that’s the root of all our tonal issues with Homie Rollerz: It attempts to take the genuinely edgy and subversive world of Homies, and present in a toothless “all ages” fashion that goes on to satisfy no one. It really leaves me to wonder just how much input Gonzales had in this video game adaptation of his original creation, and whether or not he was personally onboard to water it all down for the chance at broader consumption — to appeal to younger demographics, the likes of which it was presumed were the primary purchasers of his figure line? Or perhaps it was Destineer’s own insistence that the game be available to that larger market share, for their own chance at maximizing their returns? At the same time though as Homie Rollerz is clearly attempting to target younger players as its core consumer, it presents a handling on racing gameplay to them that isn’t nearly as accessible / intuitive as the likes of more familiar kart racing fare, and implements it all rather poorly to boot. For what it’s worth, I’ve certainly played worse kart racing games, which manage to fail even more severely in terms of both mechanics and personality. But you know, I can’t say I’m particularly interested in envisioning what something like an “idealized” version of M&M’s Kart Racing might look like? Where it comes to the Homies though, I have to admit to becoming somewhat charmed by their little universe over the course of all my writing and research, and being left genuinely wishing they had received something better than what they got.

** By my estimation, no ethnicity gets it worse in the Homies universe than Asians; who are all seen to work almost exclusively within food service and convenience stores, and whose names are often painful puns on tired stereotypes. For example: There’s ‘Chinadoll,’ who works as a waiter in the town’s beloved “One-Hung-Ho-Me” restaurant. ‘Homie Lee’ is your token Korean corner store owner, whose shop holds the distinction of being “the only store in the area not burned down during the Rodney King Riots” thanks to his camping on his roof with an AK-47. Naturally, he’s also “an eight Dan Korean Tae Kwon Do Master,” because of course he is. And who could forget ‘Japon?’ Hailing from Japan (no shit), he operates a car shop with his associates “Ninja and Pokermon” (never given their own figures), and has a girlfriend who is fittingly named ‘Japonita’ (also mercifully spared a figure rendition). If I were a betting gal, I’d wager that the reason Homie Rollerz has a Tokyo stage could possibly be attributed to Japon’s being a character initially envisioned to appear in the game at some point?

*** Oh right, I’ve gotta mention this here: At a certain point, Gonzales took notice of the rise of Juggalo subculture, and made a fairly concerted effort (if not a particularly blatant one) to appeal to them with various characters in clown facepaint. Jokawild is certainly the most iconic of this lot, though his main squeeze ‘Lady Joker’ would seem to do pretty well for herself as well in further merchandising; often featuring in her swimsuit, with her clown make-up still prominently applied. Considering how heavily pushed these clown characters were within the line, I have to imagine they were at least somewhat warmly received by Juggalos? They had to have been more successful than Gonzales’ ‘Hoodrats’ series at the very least, which attempted to market anthropomorphic rats in cholo attire. It seems that David had failed to consider the fact that the term “rat” had a fairly negative connotation within the culture. (“Seems the homies didn’t like labeling themselves as rats. I should have figured that one out ahead of time”)^[1h]

**** Incidentally: Yannis’ first industry credit is listed as providing the music for the Dreamcast release of South Park Rally — another loathsome licensed kart racer. I don’t think I’m ever gonna get around to covering that one for the site though, since it’s mostly just boring and based on a show I already dislike.

“Don’t Worry My Lil Tacito… It Will All Be Over Soon.”

“Very noble of you, senor Loco. Granted!”
Placeholder cover art for Homie Rollerz.

With Homie Rollerz finally releasing and the gaming press able to get hands on it, critics wasted no time in absolutely savaging the cartridge. But before we get into highlighting some of those reviews though, I feel somewhat obligated to note a shared theme that seemed to run through most of them: Writers accusing the game of being “racist,” with little explanation or insight into what ways precisely. Look, I’m not exactly trying to mount a blanket defense here of everything David Gonzales produced, or to claim that there aren’t some problematic elements within the Homie Rollerz game (mostly centering around Mac Daddy); but I also feel like the reviewers involved were all being a bit insincere in their intentions here? For one thing, most of these writers were white guys with seemingly no experience of the culture that Gonzales was trying to convey through Homies. For another, almost all of them affect mock-“street vernacular” in their writing and toss around ill-fitting slang for the purposes of comedy, which sure seems at odds with their own accusing the game of being guilty of cultural appropriation? I just get the distinct impression that these dudes all wanted to make sure they were establishing themselves as being on “the right side of history,” and all felt fairly confident in their assuming the game of being on the wrong side of it, even as none of them seemed to share in a proper understanding of Homies’ cultural context. This isn’t me crying “virtue signaling” like some pathetic dipshit looking to stir the pot, so much as I’m just trying to paint a picture here of a still immature age in games journalism.

Jack DeVries for IGN is quick to claim in his 2 out of 10-scoring review that “[Homie Rollerz] is a ridiculous level of difficult,” and the fact that “while technically the game is functional, the very fact that its poor design inhibits any mijos from playing the game render it useless.”^[11b] Like several other reviewers, they also take the time out to criticize perceived hypocrisy presented by the larger brand: “So now all the Homies have positive messages in their bios. Those positive messages are ‘exemplified’ by the officially licensed YouTube videos showing the Homies performing lewd sexual acts in public, using racial slurs, and picking up prostitutes. That’s good, wholesome family fun right there, ese.” In addressing the matter of difficulty in their own 1.5 out of 10 review, Nintendo World Report’s Zachary Miller states that “It takes a significant amount of re-tries to make it out of last place during any given race. And even then, some courses seemingly cannot be won.”^[12] In attempting to “cleverly” segue into the meaninglessness of car customization, Zach mentions the fact that you can “pimp your ride,” before claiming in a parenthetical aside that their “English degree just caught fire.” Ha.

Stan Spaeth for MyGamer would rate the game as a 2.6 out of 10, but not before sharing his own invented lore for the cast of Homies characters: “Gata is the town slut, Mac Daddy is the town pimp, Big Loco a tattooed ex-con who is now a youth counselor (because I want my children around an ex-con with a ton of tattoos).”^[13] To their credit though, they do go on to provide one of the better written descriptions as to the game’s awkward turning controls: “Normally, bad kart racers usually suffer from a floaty control scheme. […] Homie Rollerz actually goes in a different direct by being too tight. […] In fact, it almost feels like the player is controlling the environment as opposed to the kart racer itself.” One reviewer who actually took the time out from decrying the game as a “massive pile of section-eight shit” was GamesRadar+’s Chris Antista, who boldly took an opportunity to call out other games writers! But not in the way you’d hope for, unfortunately: “Other reviewers have called Homie Rollerz ‘hard.’ They’re wrong. It’s either: awful, unfinished, broken and completely unworthy of your time and attention. It just isn’t scientifically possible to love those racist little gumball figures enough to enjoy any part of this game.”^[14] We’ll close out this truly exhausting section with some snippets from what is actually the game’s most generously-scored (and least inadvertently offensive) review — a 5 out of 10 from Worthplaying’s Dustin Chadwell:

“The actual design work of the characters carries over fairly well, even if it is in a 3-D space on the DS, and while the visuals are a far cry from the best we’ve seen on the system, fans of the toy line will have no problem recognizing the characters represented here. […] While there is a pretty solid multiplayer support in place, you won’t have much luck in getting enough people together who’d actually want to play it. I sincerely hope that somewhere down the road, another developer will have better luck with the Homie Rollerz license.” ~ Dustin Chadwell, Worthplaying^[15]

One site which chose not to review Homie Rollerz was Destructoid, who instead opted to publish a more general condemnation of the game in the process of announcing its release. In an article posted to provide a press release by Destineer, author Colette Bennett first takes the time to bemoan the fact that a game had been made in the first place about “those little plastic figures of Mexican gang leaders and their generously tattooed ghetto chicas that you can get out of quarter machines”^[16] — accusing the brand of “encouraging children to become ghetto fabulous […] and run around with street gangs,” and inferring that all the game’s characters likely stole their vehicles (?!). Don’t worry though, folks: Colette makes sure to point out that she is “about as far from racist as you can get” (which is always a really good thing for white folk to say out loud), immediately before claiming that “the last time [she] checked a guy that wears his bandanna tied low over his eyes is hiding from more than the sunlight, you know?” Now, I’m not bringing up this ill-advised rant from well over a decade ago just to roast this poor lady or send negative vibes her way: We all have stuff we regret from that long ago, and I’m sure she’d cringe harder than any of us on having her old post read back to her. The thing is, this post in particular actually seemed to catch the attention of Gonzales himself, who appeared to reach out to Destructoid in order to arrange for one of his rare interviews — the only one he’d conduct on the subject of the game.

The interview (conducted by email) with Destructoid’s Nick Chester covers most of the usual ground you’d expect: David goes into the history of how the Homies brand began, and brags up how successful a business venture it’s been for him. When asked if he plays video games, Gonzales admits that he doesn’t; but he seems genuinely content with the fact that his kids do (“I like to look over the shoulders of my kids as they play Halo or Warcraft … just to be amazed at the incredible graphics”),^[6c] agrees that games should be considered art, and notes that his oldest son had just graduated college with a degree in computer animation and an apparent want to apply his skills to the gaming industry. David goes on to refer to his kids as his “immediate focus group” when it came to Homie Rollerz, and claims that they all found it to be “fun, adventurous and challenging.” Other than additionally stating that he had hands-on involvement with the game’s development and revealing that plans were already in the works for a follow-up title, the most pertinent point Gonzales seems keen to address ties back into that previous Destructoid article. After Nick alludes to “one of our writers […] musing that they felt the game might be a poor influence on children or send the wrong message,” David takes full advantage of the opportunity to condemn the wider press coverage of Homies in his response:

“This game is entertainment … not a social statement. There is nowhere near the violence that exists in other games on the market. Many people have their preconceived ideas about the word Homies. I cannot change that. In actuality…we are not even as edgy as South Park, or Family Guy, etc. Homies is a reference to someone from your hometown or just about anyone you would call a friend. The bios and back stories on the characters can be found on our website at www.homies.tv. I would suggest perhaps a little research is in order…especially for people that may be intending to write on the subject.” ~ David Gonzales, Homies creator^[6d]

Of course, Gonzales’ plea to the press was too little too late to turn around any of those “preconceived ideas” he mentioned, let alone save the title from a near-universally negative reception: The aggregate score for Homie Rollerz on Metacritic would ultimately settle at 23 out of 100, earning it a dubious distinction as one of the lowest-rated video games in the history of the site’s score tracking.** Whether deservedly or not, Homie Rollerz had served as an easy target for games critics, and been treated like a punching bag for their most devastating reviews. As if the critical reception weren’t bad enough, the game’s sales were also reported as a total flop, with Gonzales’ final recounting of the whole experience noting that “the game got horrible reviews and bombed.”^[1i] To attempt to quantify just how badly it may have bombed: VGChartz claims that units shipped for Homie Rollerz only numbered in the tens of thousands — roughly 70,000 copies moved at most. Considering the fact that Destineer hadn’t bothered to actually market the damned thing, I suppose it could have been worse? But still, managing less than a hundred thousand sales for a Nintendo DS title represents a fairly dire figure no matter how you try to slice it, and likely squashed any hopes for that follow-up game David had claimed was in the works. While it had been made clear that the Homies’ hopes of breaking out in the games industry had been properly crushed – that the brand as a whole had undoubtedly peaked – what was less immediately apparent was the fact that Destineer’s own days were now numbered as well.

Destineer’s continuing ventures saw a steep decline in the number of licenses offered to them, as the handling of Homie Rollerz had likely damaged their corporate reputation. Well, that, and the fact that an attempt by their Atomic Games label to produce a little game by the name of ‘Six Days in Fallujah’ had resulted in massive public scrutiny, and the eventual bankruptcy of said development studio. And so, as a means of trying to quickly recoup these combined losses, they did what so many other games companies in the Nintendo DS / Wii era would’ve chosen to do: Fully embrace the “shovelware” model of publishing generic, cheap-to-produce software — tons of it, at that. We’re talking no less than fifty games published over the span of three years; with such inspired titles as 50 Classic Games (I’m only counting that as one game here), Fantasy Aquarium World, North American Hunting Extravaganza, and Party Pigs: Farmyard Games. The only brands they were now able to collaborate with amounted to supermarket magazine rack staple USA Today (for a pair of crossword puzzle titles), television’s Iron Chef America (by way of Bad Game Hall of Fame alumni Black Lantern Studios), and the distinct honor of getting to publish the umpteenth re-release of Don Bluth’s Dragon’s Lair. Needless to say, these represented fairly dire straits for the once promising (?) publisher, who now seemed to be at risk of getting stuck producing interchangeable party games and compilation packs for the rest of their existence.

The last hope Destineer had at pulling themselves out of that hole was an agreement reached with German publishers ‘dtp entertainment AG,’ to localize their titles for the North American market. While most of these releases amounted to similar sorts of simulation-centric shovelware (the likes of My Little Baby, and an equestrian series Riding Academy), it at least served to inject some quick and easy cash into their coffers. It provided them enough funds to commission the Nintendo DS whiz kids at Renegade Kid (responsible for hardware powerhouses Moon and Dementium: The Ward) to develop a neat little ATV racing game by the name of ATV Wild Ride; once again allowing the studio to demonstrate their graphical prowess, and even sharing a couple of gameplay concepts in common with Homie Rollerz (such as the ability to perform tricks in order to earn boost power). Unfortunately, said title seemed to fly completely under the radar of most publications, despite having genuine potential as a unique arcade racer for the platform. And with Destineer’s last published game in 2011 being another loaner from dtg – the Giana Sisters reboot for DS originally released two years prior (in 2009) – the company again failed to gain any significant sales traction with it, despite its being a pretty neat game all told. And that was just about a wrap on Destineer’s decade-long period of operation: May 2011 brought news of their closure, as their website later transitioned to a past-tense monument to their time in the industry. In their self-written obituary, they took one last opportunity to claim that they had been “one of the world’s 25 largest publishers of packaged video games until 2011,” and that they had “published more than 100 family-friendly video games” during their ten-year run.

And what of developer Webfoot Technologies? Well, I’m sad to say it, but they pretty much just followed Destineer’s lead past a certain point, and similarly embraced the shovelware abyss: After a couple more Z-tier licensed affairs (the likes of The Biggest Loser and Scripps Spelling Bee, as well as a literal trash-picking-centric toy line in The Trash Pack), the brands stopped knocking at their door, and Webfoot were eventually left to languish in a hell of 99¢ iOS apps and PC mahjongg game development. Their last chance at a license of any major appeal came in 2014, with their turn-based tactics take on The Legend of Korra: A New Era Begins for the Nintendo 3DS. You get to command a team of characters from the show in familiar Fire Emblem-esque grid-based combat, with nature’s elements (air, earth, fire, and water) serving in place of the classic “weapon triangle.” It’s also a clearly low-budget affair, with some particularly exhausting early stages that killed my interest well before I could even meet up with Korra’s girlfriend. In any case, the game seemed to draw underwhelming sales (VGChartz speculates a rough 30,000 units shipped), and Webfoot hasn’t updated their official website in the eight years since its release — to where the very first thing you see on their homepage is a banner graphic advertising said Legend of Korra game. The last action the Webfoot brand saw was credit for a series of ‘Classic Card Game’ releases in 2020, wherein a suite of eight card game apps they had developed for iOS nearly a decade prior (including the likes of Hearts, Spades, and Old Maid) were all suddenly dumped on Steam at $1.99 a pop. That’s just about as tragic an end as I can imagine, honestly.

Now, despite this ostensibly being a website dedicated to deep dives into the dark corners of the video game industry, I’ve gotta make a somewhat shameful admission here: I’m actually way more interested at this point in what happened to the Homies brand and to David Gonzales post-Homie Rollerz, more so than any of the actual game companies that were involved. The long-short of it is, the game had come out at the peak of the brand’s popularity, and every project David had tried to spin off from it afterward seemed doomed to end in failure. In example: Gonzales has alluded to several attempts at getting a proper Homies or Mijos animated series picked up (I get the impression that he didn’t think much of how The Homies Hip-Hop Show had turned out), none of which ever got off the ground — even as he continued to work toward that goal as recently as 2021. Several spin-off toy lines made to capitalize on other then-contemporary fads for their time (the likes of ‘Big Head Homies’ chasing after Funko Pops’ style, or ‘Homies Zombies’ in the wake of the aughts zombie boom) never reached the heights of the original Homies figures, let alone prove competition against these newly-emerging brands and toy lines. Just about the only sub-licensing deal that seemed to work out for the Homies was a line of ‘Homies No Mas Pin’ branded phone cards sold by Krush Communications, which consumers could purchase as a means of paying lower rates on international calls (primarily popular for calls to Mexico and El Salvador). Evidently, the royalties from this deal alone had been enough to ensure that Gonzales and his family “got by pretty comfortably” during a time where the larger Homies brand was entering into steep decline.^[1j]

“I’m coming, mis amigos! Let the
revolution begin!”
‘Adelita’ design by David Gonzales.

See, by this point, even the original Homies figures had begun diminishing in their returns, as the state of the whole vending toy sales model in general was falling into stagnation and irrelevancy.*** For his part, David blamed the Homies’ seemingly “sudden” drop in popularity on the previous business decision to partner with major retailers on shelf-based Homies products; feeling that “the Homies had lost all their love at mom and pops and speciality,” and that the move to mass market had lost the line “all its street credibility.”^[1k] He also went on to blame the fact the finished quality of the figures had been in decline as well (“The later series of Homies were of a very poor quality in sculpt molding and, in some cases, the painting was downright terrible”), attributed to trying to maintain their 50¢ price point while the cost of goods had begun rising in China [where the figures were manufactured]. Of course, there’s also the fact that Gonzales could never land that “elusive ‘entertainment deal’ that would’ve brought Homies to our television sets […] which would have surely sent the Homies toy retail program through the roof.” Finally, David blames North America’s own recession economy in the 2010s as causing consumers to “cut back on spending wherever they could,” before sourly noting “that included the Homies.” All these concomitant factors seemed to combine together into an untenable situation for the Homies brand, and ultimately brought about “the end of the Homie figurine program at vending” in the early 2010s.

Now, if I could perhaps be a bit more focused in my own personal assessment here? Ten years was already a long-ass time to be selling a toy line — a line whose appeal had already been established as fairly niche in the first place, and which had gotten so far away from the plot by that point as to devolve into self-parody. It’s not the fact that the Homies had “gone mass market” in and of itself that lost them their precious street cred: It’s the fact that Gonzales had done his damnedest to shed them of their inherently subversive nature in the pursuit of said mass market. In trying to make Homies appeal to everyone, they clearly lost their appeal with the original demographic that had brought them to prominence in the first place. That’s less about “brand image” and more about the specific products that were being peddled past a certain point, which clearly held no interest with consumers; between the continued fixation on clown characters, vapid appeals to pop culture with new characters like ‘Lady Go Go,’ and – get a load of this – a Nintendo DS kart racer designed specifically for kids, completely lacking in any of the edge that actually made the original figures appealing to kids in the first place! Honestly, the worst move Gonzales might’ve ever made in the process of marketing Homies was writing all those whitewashed character bios, and pretending that these characters weren’t who they were originally intended to be: Caricatures of real-life people. Because when it comes to real life, not everyone can be neatly written as effectively having the same exact backstory — the one where they make a mistake at some point in their life, and determine to spend the rest of it dedicated to penance.

In any event: The apparent “end” of Homies eventually motivated David Gonzales to get back to his roots, and return to the t-shirt / apparel game with renewed vigor and vision. It’s in 2011 that he would establish his new company ‘DGA’ (David Gonzales Art), and triumphantly return to “airbrushing, illustrating and designing tees” after having spent “ten years drawing and designing toys” (as per copy on his original website). His new direction saw him move sharply away from the rather simplified trappings of the Homies style (at least initially), and embracing more photo-real character designs; centering primarily around Azteca and Dia De Los Muertos theming, with a healthy helping of religious iconography for good measure. One of the most popular designs produced as part of the line would be a piece by the name of ‘Reflections,’ which saw Gonzales’ own son (Andres) model for a composition in which a man is seen polishing the back of his car, and where a reflection of his face as a skeleton can be seen on the wheel well. David describes “building DGA on the back of that drawing,” and going on to sell the image on “everything from tees and blankets to canvas prints to license plates, shot glasses, and keychains.”^[1l] For what it’s worth, my personal favorite design of his is a piece titled ‘Adelita,’ featuring a lady in sugar skull makeup blowing on the smoking barrel of a Winchester rifle. The point is, these designs have comprised David’s primary business for the last several years, and have evidently done well enough for him to continue living the lifestyle he had become accustomed to. It’s even become something of a family business for him again, as his son Anthony has since taken up some of the illustration work.

“What up, homies! I’m back! Let me tell you about this strange place called Earth…”
Cover to Dynamite^® Homies, Issue #4. Illustrated by Andrew Huerta.

Of course, even with his renewed success in a new business venture, David couldn’t just let his beloved Homies go gently into that good night: He’s since begun to sell designs featuring Homies characters through his shop, as well as continuing to declare himself as “The Homie King” and taking up whatever offers come his way to produce further spin-offs and products. He returned to comics as a writer for the four-issue Dynamite Homies in 2016, with art duties handed off to one Andrew Huerta. It picks back up within the original Home-Boys continuity, follows a soon-to-be-wedded Hollywood and Gata, and generally seems like a return to form for what Gonzales had first created and envisioned so many decades ago. At the same time, David still insists that an animated series for Homies is still in the works, and even managed to release a thirteenth series of Homies figures after eleven years spent seeking a new manufacturing partner. Oh, and of course there’s a recent collaboration with a shady-ass blockchain company to produce ‘Crypto Homies,’ peddling “interactive 3D digital collectible NFTs.”^[17] Barf. Look, y’all: David Gonzales is a red-blooded capitalist, first and foremost. And if you think he’s gonna say “no” to any skeezy money-making opportunity presented to him, you’re crazier than ‘Poco Loco’ (who, incidentally, is a Homie that is reported to have earned his nickname after sustaining brain trauma from a car rolling over his head).

While it’s obviously not my place to weigh in on whether or not Homies as a whole were “a force for good or bad” in the battle for recognition of Hispanic / Latinx cultural identity, I would hope it’s a little less contentious for me to comment on David Gonzales as an artist and businessman? On those fronts, I believe he’s a legitimate master of his craft — a talented graphic designer truly dedicated to depicting an oft-underrepresented population, and presenting them with an affection and nuance rarely afforded to them within popular media. At the same time, he’s a guy who expects to be paid for his work (as we all should), and who doesn’t sell himself cheap when it comes to his business dealings. Past a certain point in his growing success and popularity, it perhaps became harder for him to truly place himself back in the shoes of the downtrodden folk he had made his profits illustrating, and it’s possible that he lost sight of what had made his art so relatable in the first place: Its raw depictions of a reality faced by much of his core audience. In sanitizing and selling that vision as a product for ever-broader retail channels, the nuance eventually washed away, and all that was left was a brand for him to continue seeking his own continued prosperity off the back of. For whatever reflections and realizations Gonzales may have come to with regards to that turn of events, he could only stop to contemplate on it for so long before returning to his work. David has always envisioned himself as his favorite creation in the character of Hollywood, and damned if he didn’t reach his goal of becoming a “successful businessman” just like him. And if he’s had to commodify his cultural identity in the process? Well, I suppose it was within his rights to do so — for better or for worse.

Now, this article has likely gotten far heavier than most of y’all initially expected when it came to the subject of a sub-par Nintendo DS kart racer! It certainly caught me off-guard the moment I realized just how much there was to unpack with regards to the subject of Homies. But I sincerely hope it’s all made for an enlightening journey — something which can serve to provide a deeper understanding of a subject matter that has historically been written off as “offensive” for its surface-level presentation, and rarely afforded the benefit of doubt or more serious consideration. We cover “bad games” on this website to try and better understand and explain the circumstances of their creation, to an extent far deeper than the average critic / reviewer is usually afforded the time to carefully consider and convey. And in covering Homie Rollerz, we not only got to cover a game that many were content to dismiss on sight, but to also cover the history of a larger brand which received a similar degree of dismissal in its broader dealings. As far as I’m concerned, that’s keeping fully in line with our interests and ideals, and I like to think that those of you who have made it this far into this article can appreciate what I’m aiming to do here. Media criticism is too often constrained by the traditional format and structures of more mainstream outlets, and I get a rare chance on this site to dive as deep as I like into the histories and reputational baggage of brands and companies that dabbled in the video game business. I only hope I’ve finally done Homie Rollerz whatever justice it is deserved.

A final question left to answer: Is Homie Rollerz truly racist as its critics have claimed? To answer that, we must reflect once more on the sociopolitical circumstances that led to its — no, wait: I forgot for a second that there’s literally only one black character in the game who goes by “Mac Daddy,” has all their dialogue written to be as completely greedy and self-absorbed as is imaginable, and who gets their ultimate wish fulfilled by swimming in pool of money Scrooge McDuck-style. Yeah, the goddamn game is a bit racist, to say the least! But reviewers who claimed that Gata is the “town slut” or failed to recognize that Big Loco is actually a positive character were also being hugely ignorant — judging characters based solely on their appearances, and developing assumptions based on internalized stereotypes. And if you wanna claim that El Chilote’s mission to liberate chile peppers from exploitation by modern-day “spice profiteers” is just a joke, and not rooted in a genuine sentiment about the mass commodification and watering-down of Mexican cuisine by American fast food corporations? Well, to that I can only say: “Viva la revolución!”

** The only Nintendo DS game to rate lower on Metacritic would be Mindscape and Gimagin’s 2007 adaptation of the TV game show Deal or No Deal, which sits at a 20 out of 100. Again, this is another title I see little purpose in reviewing, as I don’t honestly know what there even is to say about it?

*** I have to take this opportunity to link to a twelve-minute video by VICE, which follows a day in the life of a man who claims to have “lost millions” on the decline of Homies: New York vending machine operator Bradley “Sugarman” Ellison, who made his fortunes during the line’s boom period and promptly lost it all when the market stopped favoring them. It’s a fascinating bit of insight into a fringe industry, a glimpse as to how huge Homies truly were for a moment in time, and a revealing profile piece on a guy who likens his entire business to “picking the pockets of little children.”

Acknowledgements

This article benefited greatly from David Gonzales’ publishing of his own autobiography, Homies: A David Gonzales Retrospective. For as biased a source as David may be on the impact and importance of his own artistic output, the book still makes for a fascinating read; covering the history of his career in a level of detail unavailable anywhere else on the web, and packed to the brim with his beautiful full-color (and often full-page) illustrations. We could only scratch the surface in recounting some of the key details revealed within it, and had to skip past huge portions of David’s career and personal life in order to maintain a focus on our central narrative. If you’re at all interested in the further history of the Homies, or curious as to the life of the man behind the 50¢ figures (he’s certainly lived an eventful one), it obviously comes as highly recommended reading. Just be sure to grab the physical hardcover edition of it, rather than the Kindle eBook: There’s some wonkiness with regards to the scanning and page scaling in the digital edition, which renders some portions of text completely unreadable.

I’ll also use this space to plug a couple of solid videos I found on the subject of the Homies toy craze, and the controversies which arose around it. They each provide a unique perspective into how the toys took hold in Hispanic / Latinx communities, their impact on the popular culture of the time, and the complicated feelings that many may have held toward the figures’ depictions.

• (🎥) Daniel Torres: “Homies: How These Capsule Toys Shaped Chicano Identity.”
• (🎥) Viewist: “Whatever Happened to the Homies? | Newstalgia.”

A final thanks to my lovely girlfriend, who double-checked my work on this article and made sure I didn’t inadvertently say anything out of turn. ¡Te quiero cariño!

[1] b c d e f g h i j k l Gonzales, David. Homies: A David Gonzales Retrospective. Published by Dynamite Entertainment. December 21, 2016. Print. (Available digitally)
[2] O’Dell, John. “Lowrider Magazine Riding Higher Than Ever.” Los Angeles Times. April 19, 2000. Web.
[3] Larrubia, Evelyn. “‘Homies’ Toys Anger Anti-Gang Forces.” Los Angeles Times. May 24, 1999. Web.
[4] Gowen, Annie. “Latino Toys Criticized as Stereotypes.” The Washington Post. June 18, 2002. Web.
[5] Buchanan, Levi. “Homies Dominoes ‘n Dice.” IGN. March 3, 2006. Web.
[6] b c d Chester, Nick. “Destructoid interview: Homies creator David Gonzales.” Destructoid. March 21, 2008. Web.
[7] Hale, Jeff. “Destineer Announces Homie Rollerz for Nintendo DS.” GameSpy. August 14, 2007. Web. (Archive)
[8] b c Segers, Andre. “PAX 2007: Homie Rollerz.” IGN. August 26, 2007. Web.
[9] DeVries, Jack. “Homie Rollerz Hands-On.” IGN. December 21, 2007. Web.
[10] “Bling Bling!” IGN. January 22, 2008. IGN. Web.
[11] b DeVries, Jack. “Homie Rollerz Review” IGN. March 3, 2008. Web.
[12] Miller, Zachary. “Homie Rollerz Review.” Nintendo World Report. March 31, 2008. Web.
[13] Spaeth, Stan. “As Much Quality As A $0.25 Walmart Bubble Figure.” MyGamer. March 27, 2008. Web.
[14] Antista, Chris. “Homie Rollerz Review.” GamesRadar+. March 12, 2008. Web.
[15] Chadwell, Dustin. “NDS Review – ‘Homie Rollerz.’” Worthplaying. October 30, 2008. Web.
[16] Bennett, Colette. “Homie Rollerz DS: polish up your rims and get the hydraulics ready!” Destructoid. February 29, 2008. Web.
[17] “Non-Fungible Art Partners With ‘HOMIES’ Creator, David Gonzales […]” Newswire. December 9, 2021. Web.