Lamborghini American Challenge (SNES)

 It seems like ports from the Amiga to the SNES were a lot less common than they were to the Mega Drive, though there were a few, and this is one of them (originally named Crazy Cars 3). It is, obviously, a racing game about Lamborghini owners challenging each other to races in various places across the US. Though the character portraits look more like they kind of racers you'd see in something like Road Rash than the kind of millionaires who swan about racing expensive sports cars for fun.

 

Interestingly, it doesn't use the SNES' Mode 7 to render its tracks, using a more traditional line-by-line method, like you'd see in a lot of older arcade racing games. In my opinion, this method is actually better than Mode 7, though, since it looks a lot nicer than the massive stretched-out sprites used in Mode 7 race tracks, and it allows the tracks to have hills, which adds a little extra variety. As a result, this might be the best-looking racing game I've seen on the SNES. Furthermore, there's tracks with different weather conditions and different times of day, and the dusk and night races look particularly good.

 

The game's structure is a little unusual, and themed entirely around money. You start with a certain amount of it, and every race has an entry fee and a prize. Of course, this means that if you don't consistently win races, you'll eventually be unable to compete, and that gets you a game over. Complicating matters is the presence of an upgrade shop, and as you progress through the game, it pretty much becomes compulsory to buy the upgrades, since winning later races is impossible without them. I haven't yet encountered a situation whereby you accidentally give yourself a game over by spending too much on an upgrade, but it could theoretically happen.

 

As for the actual racing, it's fine. It feels incredibly smooth, and you never feel like you're fighting against the controls, or anything like that. Maybe because of this, it feels like the challenge in the harder races comes from the speed at which the opponents can go, as well as the amount of non-racer cars that get in your way, rather than from the design of the tracks themselves. There's also apparently no middle ground in difficulty: either you'll easily make your way to the front of the pack and win a race by a long long way, or you'll finish tenth in a miserable failure.

 

It's not a patch on SEGA's sprite scaling racers, but that's an unfairly high standard to hold any game to, especially one which probably had a pretty small production budget, originating on the Amiga. So, Lamborghini American Challenge is still a pretty good racing game, and like I said, it looks excellent. Also, a quick look online shows that real copies seem to be really cheap, so if you like racing games, it's probably one that's worth picking up. And of course, if you're just emulating, it's definitely worth a bit of your time, too.