Spirit of Speed 1937 (Dreamcast)

 If you've heard of this game, it's probably due to its presence on various "worst Dreamcast games ever" lists. However, it doesn't look too bad in screenshots, and it's a Dreamcast racing game, so I assumed it couldn't be as bad as people say. Plus, the old timey setting was a pretty appealling gimmick, so I gave it a try. And at first, it seemed like everyone was being too harsh on Spirit of Speed: it's a little clunky, but initial impressions are of a mediocre racing game that might provide a little bit of fun, if you're into the setting.

 

Then, you notice how long the races are. Either the track you're on is incredibly long, with lap times of multiple minutes, or you're expected to drive around the track ten or twenty times. Either way, most races are projected to take over ten minutes, sometimes significantly longer than that. On top of that, despite the game's title, you never fel like you're going fast, even at top speed in the game's fastest car. So every race has you slowly trundling around a track for a long, long time. At least the cars and tracks themselves do look pretty nice. 

 

Despite the ludicrous length of the races, I did want to finish at least one of them, in the interests of fairness. I'm not sure if it's actually possible to place first in the races, because while you're always limitd by the tchnical limitations of these old timey cars: slow accelleration, inability to take corners at any kind of speed, and so on, it seems like there's always one opponent who faces no such limitations, able to just shoot off at the start of the race, never to be seen again. The rest of them are just like you, though, so once you've left them behind, you'll likely spend a lot of time in second place, all alone with most of your opponents getting left further and further behind you, and one opponent getting further and further ahead of you.

 

However, I was never able to finish a race, as every time, without fail, something would happen to prevent me from doing so. Sometimes, the game would suddenly crash. Sometimes, the car would inexplicably stop accellerating for no obvious reason, meaning the race had to be quit via the pause menu (because this wasn't some kind of deliberate game condition that makes you instantly retre from the race). One time, I paused the game, and it just wouldn't unpause no matter what. So as well as being poorly designed, it seems that Spirit of Speed 1937 is also incompetent on a technical level.

 

I approached this game with an open mind. I think I've been clear in the past on the subject of how little patience I have for received opinion, especially when it comes to games that are supposedly universally reviled like Spirit of Speed is. However, in this instance, I have to admit that the mob is right: this is a game that fails at everything it tries to do, on almost every level. The only positive thing I can say about it is to repeat that it does look pretty nice in screenshots. It's just unfortunate that to take those screenshots, someone has to actually (attempt to) play it.

Battle Athletess Daiundokai GTO (Playstation)

 While looking up which came first out of the Battle Athletess anime and videogames, I found something surprising: it was neither! It originated as a radio drama! Then, the Saturn game was released before there was an anime. That Saturn game, is, I believe, a kind of girl-raising sim in the vein of Princess Maker or Graduation, and has never been translated into English. I guess they wanted to go a little more mainstream for this Playstation release, though, since it's a much more accessible (and less language dependent) racing game!

 

Being about athletes(s), they aren't utilising any kind of vehicles, instead running on foot! Unlike a lot of leg-based racing games, there's no athleticism required from the player in the form of high speed button-tapping. Instead, your selected runner goes at a consistent speed, and instead your focus as the player is on a couple of other matters. The first is avoiding the various obstacles strewn about the stages by going round them, jumping over them, or sliding under them. The second is management of your runner's stamina. You can hold up on the d-pad to run faster (or in the case of one character, ride a bike that appears from nowhere), which depletes your stamina meter. When it's all gone, your runner will stop for a few seconds to catch their breath.

 

All of this is presented in very colourful and charming 3D, and it's the presentation that's clearly the selling point here. There's definitely a lot of affection for the characters in the game: they're all voice acted, of course, and there's nice little touches like how when you lose in single player mode, the "continue?" countdown will be said out loud by the character who defeated you. They all each have their own stages, too. The cast is an international one, and the stages are all from the Street Fighter II school of harmless national stereotypes: the Russia stage is snowy and has nice architecture, the China stage takes place atop the great wall, the Japan stage is slightly futuristic and surrounded by neon signs, and so on. The protagonist is exempt from this, being Japanese, but having a stage that's in a place that looks like a mural painted on a nursery wall. (Japan is the only country represented by two characters). Finally, each character also has a semi-secret (and usually a little strange) pose that they adopt if you pause the game, no matter what they're doing at the time.

 

It's a pretty fun game! It'd probably be even moreso if played with other people (and, had I known about it back then, I can easily see it being in the rotation of versus games in my teenage bedroom around the turn of the century). The only real problem is that it's also very slight, and there's not really a lot of variation. The various playable characters don't really feel any different from each other, and though all the stages look different, and the obstacles on them have unique models and textures, mechanically, the only real difference between them is the way the obstacles are laid out. Even just having one unique element for each stage would have added a lot to the game. Maybe a special ability for each character, too. Still, as it is, it's still okay. You'll get a little bit of fun out of it on your own, and probably a lot more with opponents. It's also a very lovingly made game with a lot of charm, and I think that's worth something, too. I think it's worth a look for the curious at the very least.

X-Treme Express (PS2)

 Unlike most games about driving trains, even the ones aimed at kids, or the ones in which the trains are just models, X-Treme Express (also known as Tetsu 1: Densha de Battle! World Grand Prix, though as far as I can tell, there's no connection to the Densha de Go! series, and it definitely wasn't developed or published by Taito) has no interest in providing a verisimilitudinal simulation of passenger train driving. Instead, it's not just a game about racing trains, but about aggressively racing them. What's interesting is that the developers made the wise decision that this premise alone was silly enough, and didn't feel the need to add to it. So you've got somewhat realistic-looking trains from around the world, racing each other in various locations that all look like they're in Japan, but no power up items or any other overtly videogamey stuff like that.

 

Being trains, you don't have complete control over where your vehicles go at any time. Instead, you mostly control the speed of your train, slowing down at corners to avoid derailment (or you can play on easy mode, where you can't derail youself), and changing tracks at switching points when they occur. That's where the aggression comes into things: time things just right, and you can ram into the side of one of your fellow competitiors, forcing them off of the track. Alternatively, if you've got a lead and there's another train close behind you, you can stubborn stay in front of them, never giving a chance to overtake in a much more mean-spirited way than if you were driving regular road vehicles.

 

An important thing for racing games is a sense of speed, and really, that's one of the first things that'll hit you regarding X-Treme Express: when you're going full speed down a straight bit of track (or any bit of track in easy mode), you're really hurtling along in a way that real life trains never seem to, and the fact that you are driving a train at such breakneck speeds really adds to the manic feel of it all. With the lack of steering in mind, other than managing your speed to stay on the track, and shunting rivals to knock them off of it, I think a big part of the strategy is to try and place yourself on lines that have more downhill parts than uphill, though its possible that this only provides a minor boost to your speed, if any at all.

 

As well as the main grand prix mode, there's also a free mode, where you can just ride a track at any time of day, and can even turn off opponents for a more relaxing time, there's also event races with special rules like "no shunting" or "shunt every opponent to win", both of which I think show how important aggression is to the game. You start the game with a choice of thirty trains and six tracks, but looking at the "game data" screen in options shows that there's apparently a total of eighty trains in the game, and ten tracks! Furthermore, when I went online to seek more information, I could only find a conversation that brough back memories of the Dragonball GT Final Bout myths that were going around circa the turn of the century: apparently if you complete grand prix with all eighty trains, placing first in every race with no retries, you can unlock a gun that lets you derail trains infront of you by pressing L2. That sounds like nonsense, and I'm definitely not the person who's going to go and find out either way.

 

X-treme Express is a unique little game, with a lot of idiosyncracies that make take a couple of goes to get used to, but once you do, you'll find that it's a fast, fun, weird game, and definitely worth your time. Maybe not hundreds and hundreds of hours of your time, but a few of them, at least. I'm surprised it doesn't come up in conversations about weird and interesting PS2 games more often, alongside the likes of Demolition Girl and Seigi no Mikata and so on. Maybe that'll change from now on, though? 

Zero4 Champ (PC Engine)

 This is one of those cruelly tantalising PC Engine games, always on sale for cheap, but unplayable without Japanese literacy. So when a translation patch recently came out, I was very interested to see how the game actually plays. It totally surpassed my expectations! Not only is it a game that's had a lot of thought put into every part of it, but also it feels miraculous that they could have fit so much stuff into a tiny little HuCard!

 

The game starts with a little cutscene, where your friend has let you drive his car, and some other guy challenges you to a race at the traffic lights. After he beats you, he tells you about the world of drag racing (or Zero Yon, as it's apparently called in Japan?), and that becomes your new obsession. But you don't know anything about it! So you've got to start by looking in magazines to find out when and where races happen, and you've got to look mechanics up in the phone book to find one who'll tune your car for racing. Then when you find one, you've got to really be persistant in convincing him to work with you! It sounds like a weird, annoying nuisance, but it really makes the game's world feel bigger and more real.

 

Another thing adding to the realism is that, as a new racer starting at the bottom of the rankings, it'll be quite some time before you win a race, let alone win races consistently, and when you do, the prize money at this level is a pittance, a token amount. So you've got to go to part time jobs between races. This is a section that really amazed me with how much they fit into this game! There are two jobs: working at an arcade, or being a security guard at a spooky building at night. They both pay the same (and inexplicably, your wages go up as your racer rank does), but the arcade lets you play a primitive little racing minigame or try to win a plushy from the UFO catcher, while the security job is a little minigame in itself.

 

When you take the security job, you're presented with a first person view of a corridor, with eight doors lining it. You've got ninety degree turning and blobber movement, and your job is to just look inside all eight rooms. But sometimes, there'll be a thief in the room, and you'll have to fight them in a little turn-based RPG battle in which you can use magic for some reason! (Though the best strategy is to just spam attack.) There's no negative consequence for losing these battles, but your boss gives you a hefty bonus for winning them! It does feel a little repetitive, having to grind for cash in these jobs do get your car to a level at which you'll have a chance in the races, but I think it's a clever bit of ludonarrative resonance: you're working crappy jobs and scraping by, waiting until you break through as a great drag racer and start raking in cash with your skills. 

 

The races themselves are very idiosyncratic, too. Because they're drag races, there's no steering or braking to be done. Instead, you hold one button to accelerate, and you hold the other and use the d-pad to change gears. So the path to victory lies in timing your gear changes just right so you can accelerate faster than your opponent. Sometimes, you can overcome an opponent in a faster car by being more skilled than them. Conversely, sometimes, you're just completely outclassed, and a significantly more powerful car will leave you behind no matter what. The really interesting part of this is that you'll get used to how your car speeds up, the exact optimum speed at which you should change gears for the best results, then when you upgrade, you'll have to re-learn it.

 

I've really enjoyed this game, and I think there's a lot of potential in it that's curtailed a little by it being a HuCard game. I see online that it spawned a whole bunch of sequels, though, from the PC Engine CD, all the way up to the Playstation 2, so I hope some of those get translated at some point in the future. I don't know what's introduced in the later games, but I think the biggest weakness of this one is that there's no character to any of your opponents. In the illegal nighttime races, they're only referred to by the car they drive, and in the official daytime races, they're only referred to by their ranking number. It'd be really cool if they were actual characters, with the possibility to develop friendships, rivalries, and maybe even romances.

 

Obviously, I recommend giving Zero4 Champ a try, even if the subject matter doesn't particularly appeal to you. It's really got me hooked, and I can see myself continuing to play it for quite some time.

Prop Cycle (Arcade)

 There have been times in the past where I've put disclaimers at the start of arcade game reviews, because I was emulating, and the original game had some kind of specialised control scheme or gimmicky cabinet that I couldn't possibly replicate at home. Prop Cycle represents a particularly big case of this, as the original cabinet had a whole exercise bike on it, plus fans blowing wind into the player's face. But that elaborate cabinet full of moving parts is almost thirty years old now, and there are very few arcades around in the west that aren't just full of worthless garbage like coinpushers and fruit machines, so it's very unlikely most of us are ever going to encounter a functional Prop Cycle and be able to play it. So, I'm here to ask (and answer) the pertinent question: is it worth emulating, and could it have worked as a Playstation game back in the day?

 

For those who don't know what this game is, it's a game in which you pilot a pedal-powered aircraft around various stages, popping balloons for points or extra time. In easy mode, you pick one of three stages, and you're just playing for a high score in that stage. In advanced mode, you play each of the three stages, with a tighter time limit, balloons in more difficult positions, and to progress from one stage to the next, you have to hit a score quota. Advanced mode has an exclusive fourth stage, the floating continent of Solitar, but unfortunately, even through practice, turning down the difficulty, and using continues, I haven't managed to get there.

 

It might sound like scant material for a home release, but a lot of Namco's Playstation games in those early years were pretty brief. I think it wasn't until Soul Edge and Tekken 3 that they really started to pile on the extras for the home audience. Plus, it's the quality of what's in there that really matters, and that quality is very high. The game takes place in an idyllic world, obviously inspired by Laputa (as so many great videogames are), and it's all realised in some of the most beautiiful low-poly graphics you'll ever see. It's prefectly directed, too: for example, the second stage has you fly into a tunnel inhabited by (peaceful) giant worms during daylight, and as you emerge from the other side, the music changes and you're flying around a little mining village beneath a beautiful starry sky.

 

The one problem with playing through emulation is that I haven't been able to figure out a way to perfectly map the controls of the cabinet to a controller. The best I'e been able to manage (using a Dual Shock 4) is to map steering to the left analogue stick (like you'd expect), and using L2 and R2 to decrease and increase the speed of the pedals turning. It's far from perfect, but it is good enough to make playing the game an enjoyable, if slightly fiddly, experience. Of course, the theoretical Playstation port that doesn't exist would have been able to come up with something more bespoke for the game, maybe even coming up with a scheme that involed Namco's NeGcon controller. But that's just me making educated guesses on other stuff Namco did around the same time.

 

Prop Cycle is a great game, definitely worth your time to emulate, and in my opinion at least, it would also have been a worthwhile Playstation port at the time, and I think it's a shame it wasn't one. I've never been able to play it on an actual cabinet, but hopefully that'll change someday. I do know that in recent years, there's been at least one Prop Cycle-like game, complete with bike controller and fans, released by a Chinese company, but the only cabient I've encountered of that was way too small for my giant long legs to comfortably be able to pedal.

Outrun (Game Gear)

 It's once again the time of year where I post about a game that's not obscure, and most years, It seems to be a SEGA or SNK game. This time, it's SEGA's turn, with an ambitious handheld port of their classic racing game. Something that the best Game Gear games do is that rather than desperately trying to squeeze a game down from more powerful hardware, they make a version of the game that plays to the Game Gear's strengths.

 

Those strengths being the bright colours, and the fact that it's a system that somehow seems to have really brought the best out of pixel artists who worked on it. So again: rather than just scaling down all the graphics, everything's completely redrawn from scratch, and as a result, it's an amazing-looking game. The backgrounds especially look great, though it feels like there are more stages featuring ancient ruins than in more standard versions of the game.

 

As for the game itself, it plays like Outrun! At its most basic level, at least. You drive against a time limit, there's branching paths, low and high gear, all the standard stuff. There are a few changes compared to earlier versions, though. There's one negative change, so I'll get that out of the way first: you only drive through four stages in the main mode, meaning that there are only ten stages in total, compared to the standard fifteen. There's two additions to kind of make up for it, though. First, you can choose between automatic and manual transmission, which I'm pretty sure you couldn't do in the original, and second, there's a whole new racing mode!

 

You can play against a CPU opponent, or a human opponent (has anyone reading this ever played a Game Gear game over link cable, by the way? Pretty much every one at least linked up for Pokemon on Game Boy, but I've never known of anyone linking two Game Gears together). The races are always duels against a couple driving a blue Ferrari, and they take place on your choice of the the game's ten stages. It's a shame that you can only do single races, and there's no option for a single player series or anything, but it's a nice little extra, and it's a surprise it took so long for it to exist, since there'd already been ports to Master System, PC Engin,e and a bunch of microcomputers, plus a Mega Drive port that came out the same day as this one, though that one definitely makes more of an attempt at being like the arcade original, with nothing much extra besides a new BGM track.

 

I think, in the modern day where Hamster Corp. are releasing a new perfect arcade port every week, and everyone has constant access to at least three devices that can emulate arcade games at all times, it's easy for people to write off old home/handheld ports of arcade games as being necessarily inferior, and unworthy of attention. But Game Gear Outrun stands as one of many examples that many of them are interesting and unique creations in their own right.

Speed Power Gunbike (Playstation)

 Some of you might remember that I've already written about Speed Power Gunbike. If you don't remember that, don't worry: it was in a print magazine nearly a decade ago, and I'm probably a lot more clever and better at writing now. Probably. Maybe. This is also one of those cases where I'm taking into account the breadth of my readership and their knowledge of videogames. A lot of my regular readers will be at least somewhat familiar with the game, but plenty of them won't be. And it's not only worth telling those people about because it's a good game, but also because it's an interesting one.

 

It's an Inti Creates game, and if GameFAQs is to be believed (and as I'm increasingly discovering these days, it seldom is), it's their first. If true, they really got off to a strong start, foreshadowing the reputation for excellence they'd go on to  cultivate, though it's a 2D platformer, the genre for which they'd eventually become the most famous. Instead, it's a 3D update of an old concept that's mostly dead in 2025, and was pretty much dead in 1998, too: those road-based action games where your timer is also your health bar. You know: Dash Yarou, Masked Rider Club Battle Race, Mad Gear, and so on.

 

You play as one of three special operatives who get about on special Mospeada-like motorbikes that can transform into trikes and power armour. In bike mode, you go very fast, but it's not very manuverable, and you'll be sent flying if you take damage. In rally mode (the official name of the trike), you're a little slower than in bike mode, but steering is a lot easier, and you just get knocked back a little upon taking damage. In power armour mode, you slowly walk about as you please, or you can charge straight forward for a few seconds, plus you've got access to a whole bunch of weapons and can shrug off most enemy weapons without flinching (though you'll still lose time). 

 

On top of the properties of the different forms, you've also got the transitions between them to tak into account: You can switch between bike and rally mode near-instantly, and either of them can transform into srmour mode in about a second at the touch of a button. But when you transform into armour mode, you'll be charging forward for a couple of seconds, damaging any enemies or destructible scenery that's in your way. But the damage is greater depending on how fast you were going when you transformed. Conversely, when you transform back out of armour mode, you'll go back into the form you were previously. So if you were in bike mode going fast to get that big transform-ram damage, and you need to transform to make a quick getaway while there's still enemies about, you'll be transforming back into the more vulnerable bike mode when you do.

 

The lesson to take from the above paragraph is that Speed Power Gunbike is a game that requires its players to learn it. It insists that you learn its controls, the various systems at play and how they interact with each other, how to best navigate the stages, and the most effective strategies for fighting both the regular enemies and the bosses. The first time you play, you'll find a difficult, weird game with clunky controls, and in which you're constantly crashing into things andgetting hit. But the more you play it, the better you get at it, and the better you get, the more fun it is. Once you get the hang of playing it, you'll be speeding along, transforming right when you need to. It all results in a feeling of satisfaction, like that of gliding a pair of scissors down a big sheet of wrapping paper. But better, because you're not cutting wrapping paper, you're destroying stuff at high speed using transforming motorbike power armour in a setting that looks like all the best sci-fi OAVs you watched on VHS in the 90s.

 

That brings me onto the subject of how the game looks. Like you can see in the screenshots, it looks great. But unlike some Playstation games that look great by pushing the system to its limits, like Ridge Racer Type 4 or Vagrant Story, Speed Power Gunbike's secret is slightly different. This is instead a game that looks great by really leaning into what the playstation does well, in a way that few others do. Most of the things in-game are machines, buildings, and bits of big futuristic infrastructure, all depicted using big chunky polygon models, and textures that use lots of simple, solid colours to show the smooth metal and concrete surfaces that are so prevalent in this world. Even going down grey underground tunnels, it still looks great, and those grey moments mainly just make the big colourful moments of spectacle stand out even more.

 

Though this is an excellent game, it's excellent in a way that I can't recommend it unconditionally. If you're likely to just give it one go and give up on it upon the first failure, then don't bother. It's just not for you. Not every game is for everyone, don't worry about it. But if you're willing to meet it on its own terms, and put some effort into developing skill at playing an idiosyncratic action game, then you should definitely look into Speed Power Gunbike, as it's a game that'll give you back as much as you put into it.

Fatal Run (Atari 7800)

 

 The Atari 7800 is a console with an identity problem. The only place it ever really had a hance to be popular is the US, where obviously, the NES was almost uncontested as far as eight bit consoles go. I guess the heavily western-skewed design philosophy and aesthetic of its games might have fit in alongside the microcomputer culture of the UK and Europe of the time, but of course, the higher price of console games mean people would have expected higher quality to go along with it. And from a nostalgia standpoint, it doesn't have the sun-baked 20th century California feel to it that the 2600 has. In my mind, the Atari 2600 fits alongside pinball tables and the sixties Batman TV show than it does other videogames.

 

But anyway, the 7800 does inexplicably have a few exclusives, one of which being Fatal Run. It's a sprite scaling (if the effect's being fakes, they're doing a good job of it) racing game with some mild combat elements. You're acing across post-apocalyptic America, delivering a vaccine to all the towns you pss along your way, and for some reason, everyone else on the road wants to stop you doing that.  (As an aside, was the 1978 Judge Dredd story The Cursed Earth the first post-apocalypse story to use this premise? This is at least the second game I've covered here with this plot, after The Tousou Highway 2)

 

So you drive from town to town, as fast as you can, and that's the most impressive thing about Fatal Run: it really does go fast! Not only that, but the roads are winding and hilly, and you see them stretch off into the distance, far enough away that it's just a single pixel line wiggling off towards the horizon. It's a simple-looking, but very effective effect. As mentioned, you'll be attacked by other cars trying to ram you off the road, and you can fight back with various guns and gasgets, though ammunition is very limited. You get points for killing enemies, but not money, so it's not really a necessity. What you do get money for is speed: the quicker you get to each town, the fewer people will die from lack of vaccine, and the more people survive, the more you get paid. This is shown via a weird little sequence that took me by surprise the first time I saw it: you drive past the ruins of the town, looking out of your side window, as various innocent-looking people either stand still or explode and turn into gravestones. It reminds me of the kind of crude illustrations on certain kinds of American punk and metal album covers from the late eighties and early nineties.

 

Also at every town, you'll go to the car shop/bar, and these are another nice little arsthetic time capsule. They so powerfully evoke the working class America of the time (or at least a stereotype of it), and there's a few different screens used for the shops, too. I especially like the one with a TV behind the bar, switching between news and sports broadcasts. It feels like something you'd see in an early Simpsons episode, that kind of wood-panelled, slightly run down, slightly seedy place. It's actually a surprise to see a game from this time, on this console, with such a distinct, unglamourous, and non-videogamey aesthetic to it. I think if Fatal Run had looked more like a typical driving game (with the sunshine and luxury of Outrun, for example), or took place in a more standard post-apocalyptic wasteland, it might have had a harder time keeping my attention in the way that it did.

 

Fatal Run is an okay game. You won't regret never having played it, but if you do play it, you'll have a pretty good time. But as I've described, it's the way it looks and feels that really make it interersting. If you want to play a game that feels like it might have been played by Bart Simpson or Beavis and Butthead in their respective heydays, it's definitely one to look into.

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.

Formula 1 Sensation (NES)

 Only a few weeks after Royal Stone really showed off the potential of the Game Gear, I'm writing about another game that makes its aged eight bit host hardware look amazing. Though I was initially turned off by its psuedo-realisms, F-1 Sensation's amazing graphics kept me playing, and I'm glad they did, as it turns out that the game's a lot more fun than my initial reaction made out. I'd go as far as to say that it looks as good as Final Lap Twin on the PC Engine (probably my favourite racing game on that console, and also impressive on its hardware for its speed and use of split screen multiplayer).

 

But yeah, there were a few things that almost turned me away, reminding me of games I've really disliked in the past, like the Mega Drive's Super Monaco GP, for example. There's no option to drive with an automatic transmission, you have to do a qualifying lap before each race to determine your starting position, and you have to keep track of the condition of some of your car's parts (specifically the engine, tire, and wing. Though it seems to mainly be the tires that are the problem), and go into the pits to have them changed when the condition meters get low.

 

However, these things that I'd originally perceived as negatives all turned out to be incredibly minor! THe qualifying laps aren't as boring as I'd expected, and they actually give a nice chance to figure out the hardest corners and easiest straights on the course. The gear shifting, oddly, doesn't really seem to matter at all: you have four gears, though unlike in most games, you can pretty much shift into the third gear straight away and then into fourth a couple of seconds later. The acceleration pentaly for skipping gears is almost non-existent! And finally, entering the pit comes with a cute little animation of your crew changing your car's parts, only takes a few seconds, and oddly, doesn't seem to affect your race position too much, if at all. In fact, there were a couple of times where I entered the pit while in first place, and it seemed like my lead had increased when I left the pit.

 

So it turned out that this is the fast, fun, and simple kind of racing game I like the most, despite its realist trappings. There are some negatives, though! Firstly, while it is an incredible looking game for the NES/Famicom, in terms of moving at high speed and making a decent-looking attempt at a scaling effect, it's also constrained by being a Formula 1 game. That is to say: every track looks almost exactly the same, with only a slightly different colour scheme, and different sponsor names on the buildings in the background to differentiate them. Secondly, I feel like every race being five laps long might be a little too much. It means that they're all at least five minutes long, some going over seven minutes. It's just too long to be driving around such sparsely decorated tracks!

 

Those negatives are both pretty minor, though. This is still an excellent game, and though I've only played a few Famicom racing games, I'm yet to have encountered one that comes close to rivalling F-1 Sensation (though if anyone has any suggestions, please let me know, the Famicom's not a system in which I have a lot of expertise). I also want to mention that it's part of a small, exclusive club: Famicom/NES games that got released in Europe, but not North America. It wasn't a super popular system here in its heyday, so it's extra strange that a game would get released for it as late as 1993! I guess they were really hoping the popularity of Formula 1 and the NES' status as a budget console by that time would get it some sales from people who were sports fans more than they were videogame fans? Of course, its high quality, lack of language barrier, and late release make it a very rare and sought after title, and there are copies out there listed for close to an entire thousand pounds! Madness.