Midnight Run: Road Fighter 2 (Playstation)

 Yes, this is a sequel to the 1984 arcade game Road Fighter, released over a decade later, long after everyone had forgotten about it, and a couple of years after that whole genre of top-down racing games was pretty much dead and buried. So, Midnight Run is a more modern, post-Daytona and Ridge Racer 3D racing game! It's not just a generic also-ran (an also- midnight ran?), though, as it's got some interesting ideas to make it stand out.

 

Unfortunately, it's a very straight port of the arcade version, and as such, it only has three tracks, which is a little bit stingy in 1997. They do, however, all form a cohesive little fictional world, being set around differernt parts of a single city, at different times of what is presumably a single night. The easy track takes place at sunset, the intermediate track at "starlight", which is just late at night when the stars are out, and the hard track takes place at what the game calls midnight, but looks to me more like the time just before dawn. It's only a little, completely aesthetic thing, but I really like how this touch adds to the fiction of the game.

 

Moving on to the interesting stuff, this being a racing game that takes place on the streets of a city, there's regular traffic on the roads. On its own, that's nothing worthy of note, but as well as your position relative to your fellow racers, the game keeps track of how many vehicles you've passed overall, whether they're in the rce or not. Which ties into the other interesting thing that Midnight Run does: instead of keeping a high score table of lap and course times, it keeps an actual high score table of actual scores that are totted up at the end of the race, with points awarded for the time you took to finish the race, the number of vehicles passed, and the position at which you finished the race. I'm sure it's the kind of thing that racing purists would absolutely hate, but I really enjoyed the novelty and gameyness of it.

 

There's something that needs to be mentioned that is undeniably a good thing or a racing game, too: Midnight Run is very fast. Maybe the fastest racing game on Playstation that involves regular non-scifi 1990s cars in a reasonably realistic world? Even with the dearth of tracks, and the risky choice of scores over times, I don't think anyone can deny that generally, it's better for racing games to be really fast. And the controls are good enough that the speed doesn't make it difficult or annoying to play, either: it all just flows nicely and feels great to play.

 

Konami's trick of making this a sequel to a much older game that just also happened to also be about driving cars really fast worked for me, since I just had to know why there was a decade-late sequel to Road Fighter. I'm glad it did, too, since it turned out to be a great game in its own right, and I definitely recommend it to fans of late nineties racing games (and I know there's a fair few among my readership). Apparently, they actually pulled this trick again, with another Road Fighter game being released in 2010. I'd like to play it, but unfortunately, it never got a home port, and of all the long-standing Japanese arcade companies, Konami seem the least interested in making their library available on consoles if they can't get someone else like Hamster or M2 to do it for them.