Tuesday 15 September 2020

I Love Bikes! Street Racer Soul - Rider's Spirits (SNES)


 Also known as Bike Daisuki! Hashiriya Tamashii - Rider's Spirits, this game might look like one of many Mario Kart wannabes with super deformed characters and mode 7 tracks, and it pretty much is that. That is, except for one little detail: it's much more boring than most other games in this subgenre. 

 


You pick one of eight motorcyclists, including an army man, some  fairly generic girls, a character with cat ears on their helmet, a leather-clad gay stereotype, and some even more generic male motorcross guys and another one I can't remember, you race around the tracks in a grand prix arrangement with points being awarded depending on your finishing position. Of course, the CPU riders will always finish in the same order, so if you don't perform perfectly in every race, you aren't going to win the championship. 

 


There's three sets of tracks: amateur, novice, and pro. Oddly, amateur comes before novice. Unfortunately, there's no way to see the novice or pro tracks without getting first place in amateur, not even in time trial mode! After several hours of trying, the best I've been able to manage is second. So if there's a lack of variety in the screenshots, that's why. 

 


Anyway, other than the slightly wacky SD characters, this game's a lot more subdued than its genremates, and it's not a decision that works in its favour. The worst thing is the items. Firstly, there's no items to collect on the tracks, instead you can get one item per lap by going through the pit stop (though thankfully, you don't actually have to stop there). Then, when you actually use the item, it just shoots straght upwards, to descend, usually unseen and without any satusfaction, on one of the other racers. Other than that, it's a game that generally just feels slow, fiddly, and awkward at all times.

 


Obviously, I don't recommend I Love Bikes! etc, etc. Don't play it, it's rubbish. It has a translation patch, and I do kind of feel bad for the people who went out of their way to make that, but at the same time, i'm not insulting their work. It's the game itself that's bad, their translation is fine.

1 comment:

  1. We blind raced this in one of our events on MysteryFunHouse with the goal of beating Amateur and Novice, and all I can say is it gets far worse in Novice; I don't think I've ever been happier in life than when I beat it and didn't have to play it anymore. It had by far the highest percentage of forfeits which is definitely something. If it wasn't ridiculously hard it probably wouldn't have been too bad.

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