Taito Grand Prix (NES)

 This is a racing game that's impressively advanced both graphically and in terms of design. The graphics are the obvious and most immediate thing, and they are pretty impressive for a Famicom game. It's a faux-sprite scaling racer, which is impressive to begin with, but there's little touches like arches and bridges that go by overhead, that'd be impressive in a similar game on some more powerful hardware. Like, if Road Spirits or Final Lap Twin on PC Engine had an effect like that, it'd stil be impressive.

 

More impressive, though, is the game's structure. It's so much more complex than you'd expect from a racing game released in 1987! The game takes place in a region with a bunch of cities that you can travel to as you like. Each city has a parts shop selling different upgrades, and a place to register for races, with every city having its own set of three races available. Participating in races usually costs an entry fee (there is a free race in the first city that you can repeat, so you don't end up in a bankruptcy situation like in Lamborghini American Challenge), and you can win money and points. Points let you rank up, as each race also has a rank, and you can only enter races your own rank or lower.

 

The weird thing is that all the races (at least as far as I've played) aren't actually races where you beat opponents. They're more like miniature Outrun courses, where you just have to get from start to finish before time runs out. I've only been able to play races from the lowest two ranks, though, as the second rank represents a bit of a wall that I just don't have the energy or time to climb. The courses get longer, and the only way you can possibly get to the end of them within the time limit is by upgrading all the parts of your car. However, some of the parts that you need are so expensive that the only way to afford them is to play and re-play the courses you actually can finish over and over. I was enjoying the game up until this point, but I guess it's the kind of padding-out tactic that was common in longform games of the time (as opposed to the different, more subtle boring padding-out tactics that modern longform games ruin themselves with).

 

That being said, though, I know a lot of people have more patience than me for that kind of thing, so they'll probably get a lot further into Taito Grand Prix. I can't say that playing it was a totally negative experience for me, though: until I hit that wall, I actually kind of lost myself in the game for a fair few hours, and before I knew it, it was almost 4AM! So yeah, if you have the patience for it, I think you'll probably get a lot out of this game.