Moto Roader (1989)

Name:Moto Roader
Number:265
Year:1989
Publisher:NEC
Developer:NCS
Genre:Racing
Systems:Turbografx-16, Windows, Wii, Wii U
Country of Origin:Japan
Difficulty:4/5
Time:2 hours 20 minutes
Won:No (117/90L)

You know, when you're just randomly playing games looking for something easy, it's kind of strange how little you seem to find. At first, out of a hat, I picked this one, decided against it, then played some Doraemon game I added...which was not a shooter, but a game in which you defeat enemies by digging holes. Interesting, but not my thing. I came back to this, since I still had a copy and...well, decided that I should be covering this anyway.

Moto Roader is a very generic game at first glance. It looks like a forgettable, bland top-down racing game like so many others that we've forgotten over the years. A perspective chosen not because the developers were using the latest technology or deliberately choosing it for whatever reason. It had a sequel, sure, but at the time of its release, there was only one other racing game on the system, Victory Run, but 1989 was a packed year, so how did it get ahead of the pack and somehow get two sequels?

From a race results rather than the opening name selection.

There are five racers in every race, each of which can be either human or computer controlled. Which actually sounds impressive, but I'm guessing that was picked because that was how many the system could physically support rather than deliberate choice. Player 1 is always white, so that will be the one I'm racing every race. The game offers the chance to pick a name...with five letters. I'm usually not this lazy, but I went with AAAAA, because there are multiple sets of race series and even the first I would be entering the same name over and over again.

After this, and after a blonde podium girl with eyes uncomfortably close to the size of her boobs for one so gifted, we get a drone fly-by over the racetrack. It speeds up as you get further along in the series. Pretty sure this is nowhere near the first racing game to do/need something like this, but it's still rare enough that I find this helpful and new. You get to find out just enough ahead of time to find out where the real danger spots. This, as you go along, becomes increasingly more and more helpful.

This leads into the part selection menu, where you spend money on parts for your car and various special items, including weapons. This is where things get interesting, car customization. At the game start you get 5k and every race you get a certain amount depending on where you were in the race. As long as you finish, you get money. Which depends on which position you get, up to 10k for getting first. No matter what, with some trickery, it's possible to survive even if you're dead last...but it still needs trickery.

The car parts are as follows:

• Tires, these determine your acceleration, and I believe how well you turn. This makes them very important, because getting your speed back up faster is often just as important as having it in the first place.
• Body, changes the body type of your car. This improves your speed, but not to the degree that engine does. It's a bonus on top of your engine.
• Brake, determines cornering ability. You don't get a dedicated brake button, so it might help when you take off the accelerator, I wasn't paying attention enough to tell if that changed anything.
• Handle, how well you turn. I think, because the best option costs 200 I basically never went a game without having it. There are also two steering modes you can have, a more traditional left/right turn function, or...I'll explain later.
• Engine, speed, you need this, and you need a lot of it. You need to keep upgrading this to keep pace with the other racers, because otherwise you will be left in the dust. This is a dramatic change from first to even second, where having the second engine almost guarantees victory in your first race.
• Turbo, I think it improves speed. It didn't work too well for me the one time I got it, but something has to be giving the AI more speed than the body and engine.

The specials are as follows:

• Warper, the manual says this warps you ahead one place. I have never seen the AI use it and I never bought it. Because if I'm spending that much, I'm just getting Nitro for the final push.
• Gas Tank, refills your gas timer, multiple use. More on that later.
• Turner, I don't know. I've never bought it and never used it, and the AI doesn't use it.
• Nitro, rapid speed boost, one-time use. But in the end, there's only one time it's best to use.
• Grenade, shoots an explosive ahead of you. The other racers love this one.
• Bomber, drops an explosive behind you. The other racers love this one.
• Hopper, causes you to jump. There are a few situations this could be really helpful, but if you have the situational awareness to use this ahead of time, you usually can just go around the hazard.

Once you've purchased what you think is best, it's time to actually race. It's a scrolling top-down view. Use your item/weapon with button I, accelerate with button II.  Again, there are no brakes, but assuming you take your finger off the accelerator, you won't have any trouble slowing down. The real learning curve is in turning.

Now, Moto Roader can work like your average racing game. Can. Mode B handling options allow you to turn like you're playing any old racing game left and right. Mode A is different, and likely the one any modern player is going to have to figure out beforehand. Mode A is kind of like playing a game with tank controls updated to a modern audience. Tap the d-pad in the right direction and you move that way. On my machine this is a bit tricky, since holding down S, left and up causes that old keyboard locking up crap, but I can bypass this by tapping up or left as needed.

This works to the game's favor, oddly enough. Because your view is in absolute directions and this movement turns to absolute directions, in certain bad situations, you're home free. No awkwardly sliding to the left or right because you didn't turn all the way...now you can just fix that by tapping up. It allows you to match the AI in its perfectness...or at least their one bit of perfectness.

The track's made up of several distinct pieces. Narrow bits, short divides, cross junctions, hard turns, soft turns, oil slicks, jump spots and walls you have to move around. Firmly in the arcade style of the genre. If you hit a wall or a jump spot, you'll stop dead and have to go around it, but make a turn wrong, hit an oil slick or go off into the grass too fast and you'll spin around like a top. Naturally, the game sets up the tracks so you won't be able to avoid this.

The game has an absurd number of tracks, ranging from mundane, to real world race tracks, to complex obstacle courses. One group starts off with one intended to be a suburb, which would have been a nicer concept if the graphics were capable of showing it. As these go along they tend to get longer and longer, sometimes to the point that a single lap of a track feels like enough, yet often there will be two. It's impressive, but at times I wondered just how many times the player was supposed to go through a race series to even have a chance of winning.

This ties into that number you've been seeing in the corner. That's the gasoline you have left. It refills through one of three ways, gas tank power-up, through a gas zone in the middle of a lap, and when you reach the finish line. Run out, and it's a game over. It drains slowly as you go around, but it goes down faster if you're slow enough to end up on the back side of the screen.

See, If someone ends up so far behind that they'd be off the screen, they get teleported to the middle of the screen. Speed and direction are carried over. For the player, this drains their gas, but the AI has no such handicap. So if you run off the road on a sharp turn, you'll get placed back on it when the guy who made it speeds off into the distance. But you better hope you won't have to turn around too much. This is why you get the tires with the best acceleration.

But this actually creates a weird effect in several situations. In a section where the center of the road is actually bad, like an oil spill or a narrow bit off to the left or right, you can be teleported into more pain. It can actually screw you up, putting you through a nasty loop for a while. Even the AI can get tripped up by this. And on the home stretch, just because you should be second or third doesn't mean that a lucky teleport won't send you back a spot. By the same token, you can exploit this even if logically these guys should be lapping you.

Now, the other racers. They're great. They're slightly dumber humans. They act like a human logically would but they don't have the benefit of any foresight. They'll do something mostly well...if they can react in time, but the other guys aren't going to be making hairpin turns if they're at the front of the pack. Often all of the AI would go off somewhere and I alone would somehow manage to make it through. Especially often on wall pieces, where you zig-zag through walls.

They'll have one of three specials. The hoppers...which jump. I'm not sure why they get these, it never seemed to help them in any noticeable way. Then the grenades and droppers. Whether or not these were effective seemed random, sometimes they'd hit gold, other times not. This was the only experience I had with weapons. For me, it was simply more effective to use other things. There's probably some wisdom in saving a grenade for the finish, jump up a few places, but I'll explain why I didn't later.

These guys have to handle their money the same way you do. They can't get better upgrades than you theoretically could with the same money. Which is good in theory, except here's where the trouble starts. There are four other guys, and chances are the guy in second got enough cash for the biggest engine. If you purchased the second engine, there is no way for you to buy the best engine on the second race, and you need to buy something else to keep at least some parity with the racers. This starts the doom loop.

The second race is usually possible to survive. You won't get first, but maybe you can get second if you're lucky. After that, if you don't get the gas tank, you'll get teleported so many times it's game over. The other racers are going to have high powered engines and turbo chargers, you won't stand a chance. Looking back, I should have tried the same method the AI was using, perhaps this was a hint that burning your cash on the second engine wasn't the correct choice of action.

At this point, you probably expect to hear me complain about the difficulty, but I'm not going to do that. The strange serenity of the early races combined with the sheer chaos of the later ones makes it a fun experience. The few moments in a middle race I get to be in the lead, only to see every other racer slowly catch up to me. The final races I actually make it to, when I have some parity on the high end, only for every other corner to turn into a major crash for someone.

My issue is that the presentation feels goofy. The soundtrack is bland, generic happy race music. It feels somewhat out of place when the guy in the back shoots a grenade and everyone else spins around. Or just when someone is always going off the road. I wanted the option to turn it off and put something more appropriate. Having the music just be background noise contributed to the feeling on longer tracks that this race was taking too long.

I think some of the tracks should have been shorter length-wise but just throw in another lap. Some races had three, a few one, but most two. There are a lot of races, so they were doing this from a good point of view, giving the player content, but sometimes that wasn't quite as good as it could have been.

Weapons:
All of the weapon items are very effective at what they do, even if I never saw the wisdom in using them. 2

Enemies:
I've not seen better AI in a top-down racer. Of course, I don't usually play top-down racers. Feels human in that it has the same flaws humans have, and the developers did not make them perfect play AIs. 5

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
There is no want for choice here, even if the levels are obviously made of certain repeating blocks. 4

Player Agency:
While there is an option for traditional left/right steering, the point and go system this game has feels very nice to use when you get used to it. 6

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
Beneath a somewhat cutesy exterior lies chaos. 3

Graphics:
Nice, bright and happy. Doesn't quite depict what it wants to depict half the time. Seems like every race track in the world is on a bright green field. 3

Story:
None.

Sound/Music:
Sound effects are solid 16-bit representations of what they're trying to do. Music is bland and sometimes aggravating. 2

That's 25...again. Not bad for a game category which usually has quite a few zeroes in it here.

Reading the reviews for the game, not a lot of period ones, modest scores, but there were some for the Virtual Console rerelease on Wii. These find the game's very existence offensive. I gotta say, in retrospect it makes sense as to why Youtubers, despite their obvious and sometimes extreme biases, started eating the lunch of professional reviewers around this time. These do not read like the words of someone who got paid to review a game, they read like someone who feel like the good folks behind this game committed a war crime. I realize I do this sometimes, but it's usually when I actually spend the time to go through a game. If I'm not spending that much time on a game, it's usually because I don't find it that interesting.

For instance, the controls. They are unique, but I got used to them in about half a hour. It took me a moment to figure it out on the first race, but you know, that's because I'm just starting to figure things out. For 200 out of a starting 5000, you can switch to a normal left/right with the best possible handling for 200. (or as I said, the default with best possible handling) This is so cheap that I basically never went a race without it after I realized it. Or you can spend nothing to switch to it. The game is not going after you for not using it's own method of controlling the game. Yet everyone is acting like this is some impossible to get around problem which can only change if you spend an obscene amount of money. If you can survive a race, you can get the best handling even if you didn't buy it at the start. I swear any retro reviews from the late '00s should be taken with a salt shaker.

Next time, once again, trouble on the home front, but I'm going to aim for the SNES version of Wolfenstein 3D, also released on Macintosh and 3DO as Second Encounter. Since it's somewhere between a remix and quasi-expansion of the original game.