Rock N' Roll Racing/Characters

Jake Badlands or Tarquinn are the best racers for new players, and are powerhouses early in the game while control of your car is poor. Snake becomes the all-around best character once you buy the Battle Trak, which has great handling no matter who you are, but a rookie or even average player may not want to wait that long.

Each character has two skills. Here's a quick evaluation of each skill:
 * Acceleration: Gets you to top speed faster. Good for recovering from mistakes, and almost a must-have for someone without cornering.
 * Cornering: Makes it easier to navigate turns. This is far more valuable than it sounds... compare Snake and Jake (in any car other than the Battle Trak) and you'll see why.
 * Top Speed: Leave the competition in the dust!
 * Jumping: Reduces impact from landing, so bumpy roads don't give a bumpy ride. Probably the least useful attribute.

Every character has two of these skills, and there are exactly enough characters so that you can choose from every combination possible. Attributes are best when they work together in some way. Most attributes work well with the other attributes, but you may have a hard time getting jumping to work with anything.

Snake Sanders

 * Homeland: Terra
 * Skills: Acceleration, Top Speed

Snake is the game's speed demon. However, he'll have handling problems early in the game with all that speed but no cornering, so he is definitely not good for newbies.

Cyberhawk

 * Homeland: Serpentis
 * Skills: Acceleration, Jumping

Cyberhawk's attributes don't work together very much, making him one of the less useful racers. Since he lacks cornering, his handling is crap, but acceleration does make up for this somewhat.

Ivanzypher

 * Homeland: Fleagull
 * Skills: Jumping, Top Speed

Ivan's main strength is cruising over bumpy terrain at top speed. On flat terrain he doesn't have as much use. Ivan is the only character lacking both cornering and acceleration, making him the worst character in the game for turning corners.

Katarina Lyons

 * Homeland: Panteros V
 * Skills: Jumping, Cornering

Her handling is the best possible with cornering and jumping, but this makes her the only character with neither acceleration nor top speed. Perhaps still a good choice for new players, not so good a choice to take on the big boys with.

Jake Badlands

 * Homeworld: Xeno Prime
 * Skills: Acceleration, Cornering

Jake is one of the best characters for a new player. Cornering is a solid trait, because being able to turn corners quickly and reliably without losing much speed will gain much more overall speed than a higher top speed. This combined with acceleration is great, since when you do make a mistake and slow down, you can recover quickly.

Tarquinn

 * Homeland: Aurora
 * Skills: Top Speed, Cornering

Tarquinn, like Jake, is great for a new player, though perhaps better for players who make fewer mistakes. Lightning Nitros also reduce the value of acceleration, making him perhaps better than Jake for experienced players.

Olaf (secret!)

 * Homeworld: Valhalla
 * Skills: Acceleration, Top Speed, Cornering, Jumping

A combination of Snake and Jake with no weaknesses. Obviously, there would be little reason not to pick Olaf if he weren't a secret character, as he has the top for abilities. Of course, because of this he is unbalanced with the other characters, so using him is sort of "cheating".

Olaf has actually +1 on all four Skills, not just three as shown in the description.

Olaf the Stout is one of the main characters in The Lost Vikings, another game developed by Silicon & Synapse (now Blizzard) and published by Interplay.