Hooters Road Trip is a cross-country road rally where you race against other drivers to win city to city segments as you make your way from Florida to California.  Finish in the top five and you unlock the next segment of the race.  Finish in one of the top spots and you get to hang out with the Hooters Girls.  Well, apparently by "hanging out" the game means getting to watch a short Hooter Girl video.  You'll get more face time with a Hooters Girl if you go down to your local Hooters for lunch.

In fact, aside from the aforementioned videos, the Hooters Girls are conspicuously absent from the game itself, only serving as backdrops for dialog boxes and as pictures on loading screens.  There are no groups of Hooters Girls cheering you on as you race down the highway as the game's box suggests.  You can see more Hooters Girls at the Hooters website than you'll ever see in this game.

OK, so the game is not wall to wall Hooters girls, what about the racing part of the game?  Well unlike the girls of Hooters, it's quite flat.  One might think that the first thing noticeable about the game would be its minimalistic graphics and blocky textures, but that's assuming that you can keep your car on the track long enough to watch the scenery go by.  Even with the realism setting set to "arcade style" racing, the game's loose controls and questionable physics model make learning to keep your car on the road quite an adventure.  You may think that you finally have it down after you successfully navigate a turn at high speed, but the next minute you'll find yourself fishtailing out of control while cruising along at 45 MPH.  The collision detection is not entirely consistent either.  Most of the time bumping another car will send you careening out of control, but there was at least one instant where I passed through the trailer of a big rig and another when I went flying through a billboard with no noticeable effect to my car or the billboard.  Also jumping on the inconsistency bandwagon is the game's framerate.  Most of the time the game moves along quite smoothly, but it occasionally slows and drops a few frames, and, you guessed it, this invariably makes your car careen out of control.

Should you stick with it long enough so that you eventually ht upon the right combination of skill and luck to place among the top finishers, you'll be rewarded with another track featuring more of the same.  The much ballyhooed Hooters Girls videos just aren't enough of a reward for making your way through all of the game's tracks.  Speaking of tracks, there are eight in all, grouped into six different rallies.  All of the initial tracks are the same for each rally, so you'll have to play through all of the tracks you've completed before before you can ever get to the new ones. 

If there is something positive to say about the game, it is that it allows you to play your own CDs while racing.  The CD music is conveniently controlled with the numeric keypad and has the added bonus of freeing you from the game's annoying soundtrack.  Between the grating guitars and the motor scooter car sounds, you'll be happy to listen to some of your own music instead.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 28%.  It can't really be recommended for the racing or for the girls.

System Requirements:  Pentium II 350;  64 MB RAM;  12 MB Video RAM; 4x CD-ROM;  600 MB Hard Drive Space;  Mouse.