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.

MegaRace (1993)

Name:MegaRace
Number:245
Year:1993
Publisher:The Software Toolworks
Developer:Cryo
Genre:Racing
Difficulty:4/5
Time:2 hours
Won:Yes (108W/79L)

I know I said Streets of SimCity, but Streets is one of those games that works when it wants to work. Even if it does have a patch that mostly smooths out the bigger issues. This was not one of the times it wanted to work, so instead, it's time for MegaRace.

Welcome to the future. Reality is boring, which is why virtual reality is the best thing around. And the best thing in virtual reality is MegaRace. A virtual reality show where people like you get to drive in a supped up car against hordes of criminal speedpunks, who have disrespectful manners and threatening hairstyles. Pound them into the pavement!

He's referring to Factory Land, which is shown at night, so the desolate waste looks like water.

This is the way MegaRace's manual describes the game world. The introduction video, because it's 1993 and we get nice, shiny CGI graphics off a CD, shows that world. Not a world which is overtly oppressed. Not a world where jackbooted thugs are marching through the streets stepping on necks. A world where everyone is so bored by life. A world where safety regulations mean you can't actually have someone drive around shooting gangs of punks in supercars, so you have them do it in virtual reality.

It's a more down to Earth dystopia. There's even a joke prize where you're offered a book...until the host reveals its hollow. Which given modern trends and doomsayings feels about right, even if TV stations like the one broadcasting the in-game show are also falling by the wayside. On the other, as reaction channels show, reacting to someone else's shortcomings will never go out of style.

There's some clever worldbuilding going on from the moment you start the game. The framing device is that of a guy coming home from work to watch the show. Except that his personal robot turns the TV on before he's home. At several points the game implies there's genuine concern that there could be a robot revolution. One group of criminals is violently anti-robot, and a robot on the show is insulted, jokingly of course, but it does make me wonder if there's more to it.

He's talking about criminal speed gangs, of course.

But the thing about the guy is, all he does when we see him is watch the show and drink. There's not anything wrong with having some of the hard stuff while watching something, but the fact that he has his robot gets him a drink, and all he does is sit, watch and drink does suggest some unpleasant things about the guy. And I say this, being a member of the similarly sad eat food and watch something crowd.

The star of the show is host Lance Boyle, played by Christopher Erickson, an American actor presumably based in France. (His work is mostly French, so unless he's flying out every year that's a safe assumption) He pops up in the beginning to explain everything and in-between missions to compliment you and explain your next foes. This is his most notable role for reasons that are beyond me. Simply put, while MegaRace is a good game on a technical level, Erickson makes the game highly enjoyable.

Taken in screenshot form, Lance can look quite psychotic...when in motion he looks less psychotic.

For a long while, whenever I played this game, I kept thinking to myself how the portrayal of a game show host felt just a bit too skeevy. There's rumors about Richard Dwason, but in general the skeevier hosts were the kind that hid their skeeviness behind a false veneer of positivity. These days, it isn't uncommon for a game show to be less about the genuine skill of answering a question and more about how dumb they can make people look.

It helps that almost everything that comes out of his mouth is gold. I was spoiled for choice in picking out what I wanted to use as a screenshot from this guy. If I may sound biased against foreign games for a moment, I'm not sure why. French games generally aren't known for their witty dialog. In an era where translation usually fell to the guy who had the best grasp of the language rather than someone who knew what he was doing, this comes off as surprisingly natural. There's no writer listed, so we'll never know.

Now, if Boyle doesn't come off as too witty to you, you can easily skip his dialog with the press of a button. In a sense, this is why the game works so well. Yes, it's a FMV game with CGI graphics the rest of the time, but it knows not to take itself so seriously as to think you can't ever skip anything.

All the cars have Spanish names for some reason.

After the game finishes introducing the first city and gang, you get a selection of one of eight cars. Well, at first one of three. To unlock the other five, you need to defeat the five speed gangs. Each car has various attributes, armor, speed, weight, warning device, shield capability, number of lasers and missile capability.

Armor, speed and lasers are mostly self-explanatory. Damage, speed and how many shots come out when you fire. Guns have ammo, and I'm not actually sure if the car you pick changes how much ammo you have. The warning system tells you where the enemy car is. This is useful when it's behind you, because this isn't a race, you're just shooting other drivers. If a car is behind you, they can ram you from behind.

I'm not sure if weight has an affect on anything. One car ramming an enemy, or pushing it into the sidewall seems to be much the same as another. Guns have a far more dramatic and visible change. See, the last four items I mentioned can be changed by powerups on the track. You can get more or get them taken away. Unfortunately, I never got any shields or missiles. I did get my guns taken away, and that carries over between races.

The GUI depends on which car you use, which is a nice touch.

Once you get to the game, it's dead simple. Accelerate, stop, turn, along with a shoot button. The keys are rebindable, which is good, since by default, it's AZ<>. That's something I expect from a crummy ZX Spectrum game, not a DOS game from the 1990s. Unfortunately, you have to rebind them every time you start up the game. It isn't the worst default key selection ever, but not having them in a simple cluster always annoys me.

In each race you have to take out up to seven enemy drivers in three laps. That's it. Within about five minutes you have everything you could possibly need to finish the game. It's very easy to control and the game just plays so smoothly. It's to the point that until the later levels, I thought you had to work to actually hit the sides of the track.

See, the game's tracks are all pre-rendered CGI. It's less a movie you're just following along and more a series of images. Which I realize is just what a movie is, but it feels different. It doesn't quite feel on-rails even if it is. They did a very good job of making the game feel like more than what a lot of its contemporaries would do, which is expecting the CGI to do all the effort.

Some tastefully done self-advertisement.

Speed and aggression is the name of the game. The only time you're taking your foot off that pedal is when you've overtaken an enemy or you're on a narrow track. For the most part, the game gives you an incredible feeling of speed. The problem is that sometimes you're playing catch-up with an enemy car, and it feels like it takes forever. Which is a thing for the in-game audience too.

The thrillometer determines how much score you get from attacking things. In-universe, it's supposed to be a representation of how much you're exciting the audience. My issue is that it solely increases based on how fast you kill enemies. In one sense, this can work, seeing two cars going at 200 MPH and one is forcing the other into the side wall is cool. Just shooting the other guy? It's not that it's not action, it's just that it isn't that special.

It should reward tension more. Rather than raw violence, the outcome of the battle should be an unknown. "Is the Enforcer gonna take out Rabies or is he gonna run out of time?" Crashes and violence are cool, but you can't just throw endless, meaningless violence at people. There has to be tension. Victory should not be assured. Nobody remembers the nameless goons the hero fights, they always remember the ones they had epic fights with.

A nice view of an ammo down sign, because bullets are just too obvious!

Enemy cars are not the threat of the game, they're the target. The real threat are the tracks themselves. Not in the usual way. There are various power-up icons all over the track, ranging from mundane speed up/down, give/take points, ammo replenishment, the aforementioned gun, missile and shield dispensers, along with a skid function and various confusion effects. Then there are more exotic and hard to explain ones, like one that speeds you along a certain line.

At first, these are placed in such a way that makes it pure fun, then a bit of a challenge to avoid the bad ones. Once the gun removal starts, you start paying attention to the layout more. Then the game starts turning every icon (outside of the points ones) into traps. Speed ups in front of ammo or gun dispensers. Ammo removals in such a way that you have to go through one specific part of the screen. One particularly nasty level sets up the speed-ups so if you hit one, you'll be halfway through the track before you've stopped.

One of the nastier levels, which is narrow and constantly snakes around.

That said, there is one change to the enemy vehicles, it starts getting harder to ram them. It isn't like before where you could easily pound them into the sidewalk, reaching them gets tricky, and they start doing damage back. Never an amount that is noticeable in the heat of the action, but enough that it was frequent on the last few levels for me to die before reaching the end.

There are two sets of 14 tracks, making for 28 total levels. The game hides this by making the two sets based on difficulty. There's an easy and a hard difficulty, which correspond to how much the game decides you shouldn't have guns. I beat the easy set, and while the game does automatically start you on the hard set afterwards, it feels less like the game continuing and more like the game automatically put you in new game+.

There are two kinds of bonus levels. The first is a points level. The brakes on your car are disabled, you're shot forward at max speed, and oh, enemy cars are driving towards you. There's no penalty for dying, it just feels like filler. There's also one you get where if you lose in the middle of the game, but do so after doing some damage to the gang, you get a second chance. This is easier than the later stages, so chances are you'll see it once or twice.

While I make it sound like the game is complex, in the moment to moment action, most of this really doesn't matter. Unless there's a nasty symbol on the ground, I'm mostly just trying to get to the side of a car and ram it into the side of the wall or just shooting him. You just memorize the trap layout. It's well-designed enough that this doesn't feel too annoying.

In-universe, this is a tribute of NewSan to OldSan, out-of-universe, I can't blame them.

One issue I have with the game is that it constantly, and I do mean constantly, crashes. I sat down to one session and the game would either crash at the end of the first stage or the second I hit an enemy on the second. Or if I forgot to rebind the keys, it would hang on the score screen. These weren't easy crashes either, I had to restart DOSbox. Once you get past the second level, the number of these crashes drops off significantly.

It's been remiss of me to go through all this without mentioning the game's soundtrack, six slick techno tracks made by the same guy who did the Dune soundtrack, Stephane Picq. The six tracks correspond roughly to the six different locales the racetracks are set on. They fit thematically with the tracksets they're on, but I feel like they're lacking just a bit in aggression. This perhaps isn't quite a bad thing, since memorable is better than ear-splitting, but it feels more like a bad commute that fighting for my life.

With that, onto the rating.

Weapons:
You can ram into things, shoot them, or if luck is on your side, hit them with a missile. 2/10

Enemies:
There seems to be some level of AI variation, and gang leaders seem to be tougher than regular thugs. 2/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
There's some decent variety, and difficulty being the only real cause of level reuse is better than a lot of alternatives. 5/10

Player Agency:
Simple, smooth and fun to use. Whether I've meant to or not, this is the game I've been mentally comparing all the racers around it to. 8/10

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
Despite the absurdities, this feels like its own, full-fledged world, with dozens of little things hiding just behind the corner. I believe that one corporation made an underwater city, and that another company then hired some thugs to move there for entertainment purposes. 8/10

Graphics:
Despite how aged it all looks, for the most part its avoided the weaknesses of the era. Outside of CGI humans in the framing sections. There's still some spectacle here, when you can force yourself to look away from the action. Seeing this game in true, modern 3D would be really cool. 5/10

Story:
The charm here is more in the writing, but the different take on a cyberpunk dystopia is intriguing to me. Rather than overt violence, people seem to be complacent in their own oppression. 5/10

Sound/Music:
The sound design is excellent. I feel the pounding of my car against his, or the slow shredding of the side of a car against a wall. The music is very good too. 7/10

That's 42, which is oddly, the fourth such title I've given that number.

MegaRace is one of those games where what are its arguable positives can function as its flaws just as easily. The amusing commentator, the simple and easy to pick up combat could just as easily be someone else's annoying jerk and depthless spinning of wheels.

Next time, it's time for something else mega, Jill of the Jungle.

Plazma Line (1984)

Name:Plazma Line
Number:214
Year:1984
Publisher:Tecnosoft
Developer:Tecnosoft
Genre:Racing (sort of)
Difficulty:3/5
Time:30 minutes
Won:Not possible

From the people who brought you Thunder Force, Wibarm and Star Cruiser comes a weird spaceship racing game. I'm surprised there aren't more games with spaceships racing, guess developers are afraid players can't race in 3D space.

This has the dubious claim to fame as being the first home video game with 3D polygon graphics. Dubious because this claim is from a Japanese magazine, and even a brief look at their industry questions that claim. But because of it it's all over the internet. Even if it were that seems like a half-hearted complement considering this doesn't really seem like it's 3D.

This is your basic racing game with little story other than, race you fool. To control your ship, you press TAB to speed up, space speed down, and in this game, space is frictionless, don't get hit? Don't lose speed. The numpad controls you in that direction. That is, tab is forward, and numpad dodges the obstacles. This is basically the game. Dodge obstacles.

Despite having the typical Japanese computer jankiness, it controls pretty well. I never felt like I was fighting with the controls despite the game being slow. Somehow the combination of slowness and the way the controls are used comes out working against all odds. I can't explain how, it just works. Even at high speeds I don't feel like I'm fighting against things.

Let's talk about the game's big problem. I played this a bit before actually making an entry, but forgot about most of it. I think this is either my second or third playthrough, and the first in a while. I took a video.

The only reason why I lost that is because I ran out of fuel. I was going at the redline, and despite waffling around at the start, I was at sixth. Me. The guy who bitches about games requiring too fast reflexes. I was hitting the walls, but the actual objects were basically not there.

Now, that's not entirely it, at the end you have to thread the needle through a gateway, but you more or less have it. Miss the gateway, the game ends. Get hit by objects, hit the walls or get hit by missiles too many times and the game ends.

The problem is, it's a good concept, and it's fun...for all of ten minutes. It seems to loop indefinitely, but in practice you seem to see everything there is to see at the end of the first loop, everything after that is more of the same. It's basically the opposite of what I expect a 1984 game to be, there's nothing there, and it's far too easy.

Weapons:
None.

Enemies:
Other racers you can pass who occasionally shoot missiles at you. 1/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
You've seen everything after one loop, how long it goes is beyond my patience. 1/10

Player Agency:
Somehow, despite seeming like it should control poorly, very smooth. 5/10

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
It's kind of zen, dodging all these things, and it has the same feeling that old Windows star screen saver had, but despite this, boredom quickly sets in. 2/10

Graphics:
Impressive for 1984, but in practice looks less like actual 3D and more like a poor imitation of 3D. 1/10

Story:
None.

Sound/Music:
Crude blips and bloops. 1/10

That's 11.

AGE is proving to be troublesome and this weekend I did not have the time to do the kind of blazing gameplay session I'd need to get it out today. And I've kind of been distracted by Jagged Alliance 3.

Tropical Angel (1983)

Name:Tropical Angel
Number:145
Year:1983
Publisher:Irem
Developer:Irem
Genre:Racing
Difficulty:5/5
Time:50 minutes
Won:Won (48W/49L)

Summer is almost over here, meaning its time to put away the tropical shirts and tropical drinks, and start wearing sweaters and consuming a dangerous amount of pumpkin spice flavored items. While its bit a particularly unpleasant summer, I do not look forward to an equally unpleasant winter and the temperatures here have gotten to the point where its just comfortable enough. As a final hurrah, I decided to pick out this title.
Irem was one of the earliest arcade title manufacturers in Japan, you might know them for R-Type, In the Hunt or Moon Patrol. Over the years they were quite the bedrock of Japanese gaming, as such, I suspect that this will not be the last we've seen of them. They apparently did everything from cotton candy machines to pachinko in the very early days. Fun fact, it was founded by Kenzo Tsujimoto, the same person who founded Capcom.

In theory a racing game, Tropical Angel asks the player to control a water-skiing woman through a rock filled obstacle course. In practice, speed isn't all that important, but avoiding rocks is. I am curious as to how these rocks don't screw with the boat propelling me, but I don't really think logic enters into this game. And what is it with Japanese racing games and having A-class test, B-class test as track names? Maybe its because I don't pay attention to motorsport, but I can't say I've seen that used outside of the context of video games.

To further differentiate itself from the pack, the game includes a show off mode you can switch to, where the lady skier will spin around, the boat will stop speeding up, and you can't turn. Basically just for points and to make yourself seem cool. It doesn't seem like they put any effort into that lady's face. Otherwise its your basic racing setup, speed, left and right turning.

Because of the set-up, this game feels quite bizarre in how it plays. You only get the road up to a certain distance, as its being created by the boat. As such, you can't really tell what's past the boat, it seems like every time I tried to guess it went wrong. That's not to say you can't react to them, even if you can't, the combination of being able to slow down and the generous time limit means you can probably avoid most of them, at least at this point.

Prepare to see this a lot

Crashing, as in getting those penalties feels so bizarre in this game. Early on when I was just starting out it practically felt like I had a cheat mode on, because crashing isn't quite as big a deal as it should be. I mentioned the penalty, and it just feels...soft. Its comical how many times it happens, so much that despite being an effective obstacle, it doesn't quite feel right. I feel like I should be losing the game or getting something else as a penalty.

So its not really that long before I manage to win, which allows me to reach a bonus stage. The first one is all about jumping up ramps. These were sprinkled throughout the ordinary level, but often too far out of comfortable reach. If you don't hit these right, you end up falling down. On this stage automatically results in you advancing. I didn't really get a lot of bonus points here either, because they were still out of comfortable reach.

At first the A-class stages seem like the starting too, just with a slightly tighter time limit. Only, its here that the game introduces another aspect of the game, the shark. You have to avoid him, or you'll instantly lose. There's nothing wrong with this in theory, but in practice this makes the game unnecessarily brutal, at least without save states. Here I am saying the game feels strange before, now that there's something to worry about it feels annoying. The game just can't win.
The shark isn't too bad though, as most of the sections involving one has a dearth of rocks in the water, and his patterns are relatively easy to predict.

To make matters worse, it feels like the A-class stages are designed specifically so you the natural choice of the player in steering will guarantee falling into the water. Its infuriating. It feels like I should be able to slow down and spot these things, but it seems more a test of muscle memory than reaction.

The second bonus stage is a slalom. You know, water slalom is apparently a thing, but it did make me think the game was a reskinned snowsport game. Jumping, slaloming, you can understand why. This is really, really easy outside of a small handful of places. I have no idea why the game is so generous about it. Because there are places where you're practically just staying still getting past them.

None of these screenshots really convey how difficult this game truly is

The final stages are infuriating through and through. I don't know how you'd be able to get through them without save states. Getting past this section felt so absurd that watching it must look akin to seeing someone playing QWOP. Surely, it can't be that bad! Yes, it is. Now shark waves are moments of relaxation between the sheer chaos that is the rock stages. Its half being so strategically placed you're lucky to dodge them, and half I somehow went into the same stupid trap ten times in a row.

I will note that I figured out how the edges worked here, you can move into them once in a while, with no harm, but keep it down and you'll fly out.

This is all a lot different in action. Fortunately, someone else took footage of the game. I just want to note two things, he gets really lucky several times, and he eventually uses the invincibility cheat. Someone good enough to make a video on it is using a cheat. If I weren't using save states, I suspect it would have taken me a lot longer to win the game.

I like the way the game looks. The whole place oozes that tropical atmosphere. I love it. I do however, think the game is incredibly basic, as we get a few basic elements, a really nice skybox, and then...the same thing for the fifteen minute duration of the game. This works best if you set it so the game has engine noises rather than music, as the tune that plays in that case is extremely generic.

The purple water gives the place a slightly alien vibe, like this takes place on an alien world. But its not so obvious the game is screaming alien planet at you. I feel like if someone made a concept like a sci-fi beach game today, it would be so overwhelmingly alien it would feel on the nose. "This much greeting to you, Trixatrix, Concubine to the Seven Kings of Aior".

Weapons:
None.

Enemies:
A shark, who was more of a boon than a foe. 1/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
We placed rocks in this order, get past them. Technically you get the same twisty curve stuff as Outrun and other racers of this time, but it hardly matters. Absolute insanity. 3/10

Player Agency:
This is probably intentional, but the controls felt a bit too stiff. Since the game is all about water-skiing, its probably trying to emulate a slightly awkward way of moving around. 3/10

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
I liked the way the game depicted its tropical setting, but I just wish there was more of it. More islands, some tropical music, maybe even some seagulls. 4/10

Graphics:
I have some minor difficulty figuring out where rocks are going to appear in front of me, but otherwise, I think the game looks great. 4/10

Story:
None.

Sound/Music:
The game offers two modes, music and sound mode. The music is your typical happy NES tune, while the sound is okay. Just about what you'd expect from this kind of sound chip. 2/10

That's 17.

This seems like quite an extreme contrast. So many zeroes and yet quite a few aspects I liked. Thus its somehow become the highest rated game of 1983. It actually made the average for this year jump a point...to 7. (the games I played before actually getting to this year were all bad)
I hope it does not remain that way. Not because I didn't enjoy it, but because of what that would mean. I would recommend this to racing game fans, but that's partially because racing game fans seem to just hate themselves based on how hard racing games tend to be.

Programming note, this will probably be the last 1983 game I blog about until November. I have a very interesting title to talk about next, and I also want to get through as many FPS titles as I can through the rest of this year.

Deathtrack (1989)

Another one of these fancy animated title screens, this is the only interesting bit

Name:Deathtrack
Number:138
Year:1989
Publisher:Activision
Developer:Dynamix
Genre:Racing
Difficulty:4/5
Time:3 hours
Won:Yes, I think (46W/48L)

We're finally back with Dynamix for the American version of SeeNa, racing meets early FPS, and this time, I'll actually be able to shoot something. Damon Slye doesn't have much to do with this game, but Dynamix co-founder Jeffrey Tunnell is directing and Dynamix veteran Dariusz Lukaszuk is programming and designing the tracks, so I think we're in good hands.
The manual does a good job of explaining the game, but not so much its backstory. Society has failed, so let's have a bunch of races where people shoot each other across America. Nothing terribly complex. So much so that its practically just an afterthought. I do question why its across the country and not centered in one city though. Doesn't really matter since its not supposed to be important. What is important, is that this has a MT-32 soundtrack.

Spoiler alert, you don't get three machine guns

Once you pick a name you can select one of three cars, a fast one, a balanced one, and a fighting focused one. (screenshot is of the balanced one) This technically doesn't matter since you can upgrade the cars, but in practice I used the fighting one. Worked out best for me. You get three options for the various parts, from the usual engine, armor and tires, to brakes and transmissions. Weapons are run in three options, but curiously, with the higher quality options you get less ammo for them. You're possibly paying for a single shot of ammo, so those missiles cost at least $1000 a pop. Either way you get a full loadout of all weapons with each car, just probably without ammo.

There are a lot of things going on in one screenshot, but the most important bit is I'm last

I start the game with the single race mode...and its crap. Think of Outrun, a game where you're not really controlling something in a 3D space as much as moving left and right on a treadmill. Now add awkward controls to that, where it doesn't feel like moving to the left or the right is actually working. Now add to the fact that you have to shoot at things that shoot back at you. Its not any wonder that this game fell through the cracks, even for 1989 it plays poorly.
Playing through the opening track several times with a variety of vehicles and settings its abundantly clear that I'm not getting any better at it. I don't feel like I'm in control of the car and I consistently end up last or next to last. There's an autopilot mode mentioned in the manual, but that's actually off, turning it on makes it all worse. So much worse. You can also screw around with the amount of laps each race takes, but I never messed with the default setting of 5.
The sound is interesting. The music isn't some kickass tune you'd expect to hear in a racing game. The menu theme is a dark, melancholic thing, while the in-game music seems like something an action movie would play as a variation of the title theme during a minor scene. I quite like it, but it doesn't quite feel right. It lacks the energy it needs for what is supposedly a hi-octane racing game. Its pleasant enough to listen to a few times, but it seems short for a game of this length. There are only two tracks. Sound is typical PC speaker, and doesn't feel objectionable.

The tires are 500 new, so I'm really lucking out by only paying 60

After a few more tries, I decide its time to test my hand at what passes for a career mode in this game. Its a simple drive through the various tracks the game has, only with a persistent state for your car and money. Make no mistake, while its entirely possible to survive a race without issues, lasting through the campaign is a challenge in of itself. Nobody dies for real, but running out of money will render you unable to race. Repairs of parts costs practically the same as those parts.

I feel bad for the guy they hired, if I ever saw him again I don't think I could unsee him as the creepy guy from Deathtrack

In addition to placing higher to earn money, you can get challenges by a strange man to take out a specific driver. Taking them out otherwise does nothing but free up the road. He claims to be upset should you lose, but he's not too broken up about it to not offer you another challenge. Whether or not you can take these vehicles out depends on what they are. The faster opponents are all but impossible to catch up with. Well, I'll explain what I'm missing in a bit.
So, its clear that I'm missing the strategy of this game. Even if its crap there must be one. Over the course of my first few playthroughs of the career mode, which usually end in my demise, I put together a few points that improved my chances, and possibly yours.

The different cars have different interiors, which is nice

Despite the absolutely awful-feeling control scheme, you can stay on the track surprisingly well assuming you master when and for how long you turn. Do it right and you'll remain on the road despite barreling through at high speeds. This assumes its not one of the tracks with a very twisty road, as opposed to long single turns or the odd turn.

There's one other guy on the road, and of course he shot me from half the track away

If you're getting hit by a missile, go off road, or stop. It sounds silly, but slowing down works in some cases. Terminators seem to almost always get dodged, but the regular kind are more of a question. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. If I cared more about this game, I'd try to work that out.

I wonder how many of these references are to military gear

The machine gun is a pile of crap at its lowest level, so don't ever buy ammo for it. What are useful as front-facing weapons are the lasers and the particle beam. Both are very effective against opponents, while they don't cost ammo. While lasers are limited in shots per track, that's not too much of a problem. Similarly, the ram and wheel spikes are worth upgrading, since its free damage, more or less.
More expensive items like the missiles do take out enemies, but aren't really worth the price. Two missiles take out one enemy, but that's 2k down the drain, minimum. The terminator missile might even hit you if you aren't careful.

Basically how most races go

Because you have to pay considerable sums on repairs, its a wise idea to not upgrade ahead of your capability to pay. The maximum you can reliably get from a single race is a little over 13k, which would have paid my repair and rearming bill with a little extra. I never got the most expensive engine or really focused on upgrading anything besides durability and endurance. From my single track runs that seemed a quick ticket to running out of money.

See? So powerful everyone is using them!

Caltrops are immensely useful. More so than mines. The literal first time I started using them I actually placed. I was actually winning. I would have survived a full run of the tracks if I didn't try this at a time when I was already on the road to failure and then landed on a stray mine. I tried these on a single track run and got 4th first try, and then 2nd. You get the most bang for your buck with these things. Buy as many as you can, and whenever you see some poor fool behind you, drop a couple and see how they become a dot in your real view mirror. Once I figured this out, everything fell into place.
Just be warned it can happen to you too. These things have deceptively wide range, so even if you think you've dodged one, you'll still get hit. As such, it can be a tricky thing dodging them. Slowing down doesn't really work.
Its seemingly a good idea to do a combination of playing the race seriously and placing caltrops to take out the fast drivers to win. Advancing past the more combat-minded ones tends to result in them taking each other out, so that even I could lap them.

Slow and steady wins the race is a good saying when surviving is lucky

As you can see, I won the career mode by placing consistently, but often not in first. This gives me all the usual simple "you won" stuff you'd expect from a game of this era. But then it gets interesting, I advance to the next skill level with the gear and cash I got from the previous tier. (I started on 2 and I assume this sent me to 3) Its not that impressive a haul as you'd think. Despite doing that, I spent a lot more on repairs and ammo than upgrades.
Its at the higher difficulty where this strategy starts showing cracks. I'm no longer consistently placing in 1st or 2nd, only rarely do I manage to reach there. Often, I end up losing my car. Primarily to missiles. Missiles can supposedly be dodged by slowing down, but it rarely seems to work.
Still, I manage to make it through with the highest placements of anyone. With the caveat that whenever my car was destroyed I quit and reloaded. I never won enough money for this not to be my default behavior. In this case it often seems like simply finishing every race is enough to win. Is the final section considerably more difficult?

I swear I've seen this screen cracking effect in a different game

Yes, by now it seems rare for me to actually finish a race. It doesn't matter what I'm doing, missiles are sent straight to me, even if I'm in absolute last at the start of the race. Making it feel random if I win or not. Still, I manage to slowly slide up to first in a lot of races, thanks to having a mostly high-end car with the mid-range engine. Even losing on the last race I get a circuit champion thing...and there's another circuit...? This makes me question if the game has an end, as such, or merely loops around indefinitely. Either way I'm going to count having won multiple circuits for my own win column.

In addition to ones in the manual, opponents have in-game profiles, including the only international competitor

Weapons:
With how the game is set up, selecting a good majority of the weapon options is simply unfeasible except as single shots in a single track run. Even discarding that, there's a very clear advantage to using caltrops every race, since otherwise its very tricky to actually race past opponents. 2/10

Enemies:
I recognize that there are several different racers, all with different parts and weapons, but its hard to tell who is who. When they're crusing past you at 300 MPH, you can't see them except as a brief flash of color. When you're smashing into their backside...well, it doesn't matter anymore. 3/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
Because of the control issues I had with the game, it was sort of hard to see the tracks all that distinctly. Some tracks are straighter, some are twisty and turny. They try to make them feel distinct, but because of the way the game is designed they don't feel that way. 1/10

Player Agency:
There's this feeling of constantly driving on-top of a super soft substance like butter or something. Its okay when you're going at a certain speed on a certain section of it, but if you're not going that speed it feels like you're stopping dead in your tracks. 1/10

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
This game feels like a mess of contradictions. A dark, dystopian world that can't commit to being that. A 3d game that still feels firmly stuck in the past. A combat racer that doesn't really want to be a combat racer. It just feels like a strange mesh of ill-formed ideas. 2/10

Graphics:
Its okay looking for 1989 3D. 2/10

Story:
Suddenly, there are a bunch of racers shooting each other across America. Not lethally, because that would be bad. I'm used to excuse plots, but there's basically none, it just happened. 0/10

Sound/Music:
Music is decent, somewhat ill-fitting, but not enough for the game's length. Sounds are PC speaker and unobjectionable. 3/10

That's 14.

What's holding this game back is the strange driving scheme. Racing games took a while before figuring out how to work in 3D, but this isn't that. This is Outrun in overglorified 3D. There's no excuse for it. Seeing as this is one of those titles that was alleged to be on the FPS side of things I'm quite disappointed in it. It hardly fits that genre and even feels like it had a insignificant influence on car combat games later on. I'm disappointed in Dynamix too, since they're supposed to be the gold standard for vehicle simulations of the time, and this doesn't meet that standard.

The final game I've put in the '80s FPS pile is Sleeping Gods Lie, which has been described as that at times, along with adventure and RPG. The latter by a Russian source that is nearly always right on these things.