I remember when Cruis’n USA and Killer Instinct were shown off and allegedly were using Nintendo 64 technology. It was 64-bits! Fuck your 32-bits, they were leap frogging that shit! Both games seemed far ahead of their time and the prospect of arcade perfect ports of these two games on Nintendo’s future console made many […]Cruis’n USA
I remember when Cruis’n USA and Killer Instinct were shown off and allegedly were using Nintendo 64 technology. It was 64-bits! Fuck your 32-bits, they were leap frogging that shit! Both games seemed far ahead of their time and the prospect of arcade perfect ports of these two games on Nintendo’s future console made many […]
I love Outrun and it’s funny to track my history with the series as I came to it in a backwards fashion. The pretty good Master System conversion was my first exposure to it and while good my mind was blown upon seeing the arcade game. The ridiculous number of scaling sprites was practically a […]
The anticipation for the Saturn port of Daytona USA was only matched by the disappointment of its technical shortcomings. For those that stuck with it the gameplay was more or less accurate but it’s kind of hard to appreciate when the game is damn near building the track right in front of your face. The […]
While I have a great deal of nostalgia for 8-bit games of all stripes racing games are the hardest to go back to. The march of technology has left the vast majority of these games lacking and while I can still appreciate Excitebike I’d just as soon rather play something more modern. Square’s Rad Racer […]
Back in the 32-bit era the thought of Ridge Racer or any Namco property appearing on a rival platform was pretty much blasphemous. Their partnership with Sony was one of the most lucrative in history but in the waning years of the generation there was nothing to lose in experimenting with a new user base. […]
As early as the beginning of the 90s it was obvious that 3d and polygons were the future of the industry and Sega were one of the main players pushing technology forward with their big budget arcade titles. Virtua Racing was not the first 3d racing game but it is probably the most important. The […]
I can safely say that I’ve sunk more hours into Wave Race 64 than any other racing game outside of Super Mario Kart. I went into it with no expectations and was completely blown away. Who would have thought a sequel to a little known Game Boy title would be one of the most stunning […]
When the Star Wars: Episode One video game adaptations were announced I’ll admit, I was disappointed that the N64 would be “saddled” with just a pod racing game, especially in light of the PlayStation receiving the action game I thought I was looking for. The Nintendo 64 sure as hell did not need another racing […]
During the Nintendo 64’s first year on the market new releases were incredibly sparse and as such each and every game was scrutinized. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that War Gods was terrible while an unknown (at least in video games) quantity like Turok stood out more due to a lack of […]
I will admit that of all the franchises to make the leap to the 32-bit generation I never expected Top Gear would be one of them. I enjoyed the 16-bit installments but never thought much of them however Kemco did an excellent job of expanding the brand on the N64 with Top Gear Rally, Top […]
Of all the genres that are hard to go back to pre-3d racing games probably rank first. It’s not to say every 2d racing game is bad but the move to 3d gave the most benefit to the genre. Stand out titles like Super Mario Kart and F-Zero still hold up but for the vast […]
Mario Kart Double Dash is often looked on as the black sheep of the series as it introduced many new elements that were not fully embraced by the fans. Let’s face it, innovating within the kart racing genre (or racing games in general) is damn near impossible as their mechanics are pretty well set. Which […]
When Sega reentered the home console market with the Dreamcast no one knew what to expect. After all the Saturn had a pretty miserable exit and its handling in the US left a bad taste in gamer’s mouths. However the Dreamcast launch would go down in history as one of the most successful of all […]
Wipeout was one of the early superstars of the PlayStation launch, earning Sony legitimacy as a platform holder and being one of the better titles available in spite of its difficulty. The futuristic racing genre had not been firmly established yet and so alongside F-Zero Wipeout would come to define its mechanics. While solid there […]
When Sony announced their entry into the home console market many were skeptical due to their less than stellar track record as a third party publisher. With no notable intellectual properties under their belt the question became who would supply them with the killer app they needed to be taken seriously by consumers. Battle Arena […]
There were many late NES titles that went overlooked as the SNES took the spotlight, some of them classics, some technically brilliant but sorely lacking in gameplay. The racing genre was not one of the most crowded in the NES library and so R.C. Pro Am stood out for its unique viewpoint and tight gameplay. […]
Well this was certainly unexpected. Psygnosis were the jewel in Sony’s development cap and the key to gaining them respectability as a console manufacturer. Let’s be honest, Sony Imagesoft sure as hell were not the ones you looked to for quality gaming. Sometime around 1996 for a brief period Psygnosis regained some of their autonomy […]
Sega’s racing game history in arcades probably stretches back farther than anyone with the likes of Outrun and Hang-On putting them on the map. They were even one of the pioneers in pushing 3d with Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter. Their original home efforts usually didn’t receive as much fanfare. While everyone remembers Daytona and […]
These days we live in a world where every game has a dedicated release date and Gamestop employees relentlessly hound you to preorder every game you’re even slightly interested in. But back in the 80s that wasn’t the case. Games more or less showed up in stores with little fanfare; even when video game magazines […]
I’m pretty sure no one thought Psygnosis would be Sony’s ace in the hole when they made the leap to console manufacturer. Not to downplay the many great games they’ve made over the years but around 94-95 I imagine most people still thought of them as the company that made the Lemmings games. However the […]
Christmas 1987 stands out for a number of reasons for me personally because I distinctly remember receiving numerous games as presents that year. Kid Niki and Rad Racer were the two lucky recipients in my household that fateful day and while Kid Niki was decent for its time this is what kept us occupied all […]
Have you ever played a Carpg? I just made up that term but it adequately describes Final Lap Twin. Long before Square Enix shit the bed with Racing Lagoon, a game we were mercifully spared, Namco graced the Turbo Grafx-16 with Final Lap Twin and its exclusive quest mode in a rare third party release […]
I suppose everyone had to find their niche somehow. By the end of the N64’s first year on the market there were entirely too many racing games in my opinion. Any developer trying to make a splash in that crowded space would have to do something different; the standard Ridge Racer style power slide extravaganza […]
NEC came back to the US gaming scene initially with the weird Dreamcast game Industrial Spy: Operation Espionage in 2000, ending a 7-year publishing hiatus. While they had disappeared after the failure of the Turbo Grafx-16 in Japan they were a prolific publisher, supporting nearly every console overseas. With their resurgence it was thought that […]
Although Extreme G was not an exceptional game it at least had the foundation for a competent futuristic racing game. It simply lacked polish in terms of its play mechanics. Extreme G-2 manages to fix the majority of the flaws of the first game but introduces new ones all its own that unfortunately bring down […]
There’s no polite way to say it: the Saturn version of Daytona USA is one of the most disappointing home console ports of all time. As the 16-bit era waned and magazines were flooded with all kinds of technical details of the upcoming consoles the dream of owning arcade perfect ports of the most famous […]
One thing you can say about the N64, it has more than its fair share of racing games. Of the 290 or so North American releases for the system almost 50 are some form of racing game. With that many nearly every incarnationof the genre were covered from car combat to the more esoteric […]
I remember the racing games of the 32-bit era pretty well. Most were a stuttering mess that could barely keep a decent framerate and even when they did it was in the low 20s at best. Sure we had our Gran Turismos and Ridge Racers but those were the exception, not the rule. The N64 […]
Racing games during the 16-bit era were an interesting animal. 3-D had yet to take the market by storm, being relegated to expensive arcade cabinets. The advent of Mode 7 and various other scaling methods to simulate a 3-d plane were fascinating to say the least. One of the most striking attempts was Super Off […]
The early months of the SNES’s launch saw a slew of developers shoehorn Mode 7 effects into their games for no discernable reason. Seriously, how many games in the first year did the “zoom into the map” effect? Not that I blame them, it was an easy effect used to dazzle tween minds across the […]
The early days of the N64 can be summed up in 1 word: waiting. As third parties ran screaming from cartridges and Nintendo’s hefty license fees not only were releases few and far between but constantly delayed as well. As someone who lived through that period it was infuriating, let me tell you. The games […]
Hype is an inescapable part of the video game industry. Whether it is a developer extolling the virtues of their latest creation to game journalists struggling to put into words how awesome a new product they’ve just seen is, we are all guilty of falling for it. New console launches are when these events are […]
During the 32-bit era no exclusive developer was more important to their partner than Rare was to Nintendo. You could argue Squaresoft filled that role for Sony but the truth is even without them there were a ton of other third parties that would have picked up the slack. Whenever Nintendo would delay a game […]
