Promising-looking street racer Juiced - originally due to be released this month by Acclaim for PS2, Xbox and PC - has survived the company's bankruptcy and will still see release - although it's not yet clear who will publish it or when. The UK-developed game was actually funded not by Acclaim but by independent backers, leaving coders Juiced Games free to find a new publisher for the title.
While the game has drawn comparisons to Need For Speed: Underground, unlike NFS the game features licensed cars from the likes of Toyota, Honda VW, Fiat, Renault and Subaru. And you won't be stuck with a bog-standard showroom model either: Juiced offers thousands of realtime modding combinations, taking in everything from the stickers - sorry, decals - on your motor to the gubbins that actually make the thing go.
The racing itself will revolve around a non-linear, cash and profile based single-player mode, or allow you to take your exhaustively modded motor into action online on all formats.
However, it's less clear what the fate will be of the other games that were on Acclaim's release schedule, including The Bard's Tale, 100 Bullets, Combat Elite: WWII Paratroopers, The Red Star, ATV Quad Power Racing 3, Emergency Mayhem, The Last Job, Interview with Made Man and All-Star Baseball 2005.
Chances are that the majority will never see the light of day after Acclaim were last week forced to file for bankruptcy with debts of over $100 million. Of that, lenders GMAC are owed around $30 million, with the rest owed to a variety of developers - who may only see as little as 10% of the money that they were originally due to receive.
A 29-year-old PC racing game going cyberpunk anime with Troy Baker, Initial D drifting, and cutscenes from the Metroid: Other M studio sure wasn't on my Game Awards bingo card
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