DethKarz

One of the greatest racing games of all time. Legendary music, artwork, and game play mechanics that are still fun and clean in 2026. (Works on Linux, with maximum performance, use proton 9.X)

[h1] DethKarz [/h1] [h3] Positives: [/h3] + The nostalgia and retro feel + A state of the art graphics for its time + Quite nice handling and physics + Good sense of speed + Cool tracks and cars + Power ups and weapons + Awesome soundtrack + Different difficulty settings + Quite a lot of adjustments can be made in the graphics settings [h3] Negatives: [/h3] - A few bugs and glitches - Has some issues running on windows 11 (remember this was made for windows 95!) - The championship needs more balance in difficulty and setup - Really only 4 tracks and cars (the only difference is length and classes) - Some annoying sounds (especially the low energy and incoming warnings) - When the music track is finished, its just silence till the end of the race - Widescreen resolutions are stretched - Only 60 fps (anything over will break physics) [h3] Conclusion: [/h3] Back in the day this was one of the coolest games you could play. And if you invested in a monster computer (like a hefty Pentium II Processor, 128 MB RAM, Voodoo2 Graphics Card with 12 MB RAM and a Sound Blaster Live! Sound Card) you could experience the eye candy and eargasms from a different world. But your bank account would take a major hit, because this was extremely expensive equipment back in 1998. I still think though (mind you I got my nostalgia glasses on) it looks quite beautiful. And the soundtrack is just fantastic, with its awesome futuristic techno beats. But to get it running on modern computers requires some tweaks (see more below). And even though the game has a few issues gameplay wise, I still think its well worth a playthrough today. [h1] Total Score: 7/10 [/h1] [b] Tweaks for playing the game in Windows 11: [/b] - Open the included nGlide Configurator - Select DirectX as Video backend, select your monitors resolution and refresh rate, then press apply - When starting the game it will either just not start or hang in the loading screen - If it dosent start, open task manager (CTRL+ALT+DELETE), and close the game from there (it might run in the background) and then restart the computer - If it hangs in the loading screen, press ALT + TAB, find the VideoBeam window and close it - This will skip the problematic intro video and the game should start normally - Sometimes when the loading screen hangs, its also possible to ALT + F4 to automatically close the VideoBeam window - When the game is up and running, go to graphics settings in the options menu - Set resolution to 1024x768 16 bit, framerate to 60, and slowdown to none. - Go to customize performance and set everything to on, high or full - Start racing and enjoy the best possible graphics there were in 1998! - If you still encounter sudden exits, restart your pc - If that dosent work, experiment with windows compatibility settings in the properties of the Dethkarz.exe file, f.ex. select win95 or win98/ME compatibility