Super Mario Kart

Possibly the most fun racer on the console

Hi Kids, do you like driving? What do you meant "yes" you're not old enough. For those that wanted to drive and like the idea of driving but weren't specifically old enough to do it, there was Go-Karting. A wondrously fun little activity of driving around a track on a seat close enough to scrap your arse-flesh off if it was any close to the ground while replacement lawnmower engines turned wheels and let kids experience the "high speed" thrills of driving into walls. Thankfully Super Mario Kart on the SNES is a lot more fun and not just because I get to throw things other than bricks at people, again.

Your Roster: Pratt and brother, the annoying accelerators, the fatties and the extras

THE Kart racing game of the 16bit era and THE Kart racing franchise that has helped keep Nintendo afloat for a while by re-inventing the same game into new versions for the upcoming consoles that Nintendo have never done before or does with any other franchise it has (Mario, Zelda, Pokemon, Metroid... Seriously, how many times must I walk up and find a missile, or a flower or catch another fucking Pikachu...).

You win the small cup. Now man-up and go for a bigger race.

But enough digging commentary for the moment (it's only ever for the moment) what we have here is a grand scope of a game made possible by the use and clever implementation of Mode 7 on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Mode 7 being a specific function that allowed for the rapid and quick movement and re-drawing of sprites to scale, stretching and rotating that wasn't feasible before on the NES. Thanks to this, we get large colourful tracks that move fairly fluidly around the character sprite while we trundle along on the little wheels trying to pick up coins, powerups and ultimate bash the hell out of our enemies.

Lava lava everywhere and all of it is... mildly annoying.

The game has a starting line up of 8 characters to choose from. In that with most racing games there will be this little thing of having fast cars with slow acceleration, slow cars with fast acceleration, all-rounder cars and "something a bit either side of the all rounder if you want to be really fucking picky with" cars. You've Mario and Luigi as the all-rounders, Donkey Kong Jr and Bowser for the fast with slow acceleration cars, Peach and Yoshi for the quicker acceleration and finally Toad and KoopaTroopa for the extra little specification, which was previously listed.

A huge number one to obnoxiously proclaim your victory, probably more so than the player would.

During your races you'll be able to collect up to 10 coins to help boost your stats and lose them each time you fall off the track, drive into lava, drown, get hit by weapons and so on and forth though if you know the racing line well enough, it'll not be an issue. You'll also be able to collect multiple weapons ranging from the green shell which fires straight and bounces around, the red shell which is your heat seeking variety of shell, bananas to drop to the ground and let others run into it, stars which boost all stats to 10 and make you invincible to everything barring falling off the course, 2 extra coins (whoo...), mushrooms to boost your speed across even rough terrain and improvise shortcuts, ghosts to steal other items while making you ethereal, feathers to jump over items and walls for more shortcuts and the lightning bolt which shrinks everyone else and lets you run them over.

Quite a lot.

If you're being attacked, you get the mildly obscured "rear view" which MIGHT help you.

However, this being the first days of Kart gaming for Nintendo, the AI isn't quite as "human" as one might hope for or even expect. Weapons are pre-designated for specific characters and fire/use them in different ways than you can in most cases. For example, Bowser has a fireball that moves back and forth on the track, you don't. Mario and Luigi as AI can use invincibility stars when they choose, you can't. Peach and Toad drop/throw mushrooms that shrink you, you can't do that either. Yoshi hurls eggs, you can't even get them. But then none of them can use the lightning bolt or use boosters across heavy terrain, or feathers to get around corners/walls. Though having said that, they can run over items and use them as ramps rather than getting hit.

Solo time trial. For the gamer that REALLY plays alone.

Another odd instance is that, apart from the starting line-up, all the AI will race along the exact same racing line bar a few movements here and there. There is very VERY little deviation from one racer to the next in how they navigate the track. Which means that the items you drop MUST be carefully placed, but if you can always drop them in that place, you've a powerful advantage (or you get hit by your own stuff). The AI also manages to keep track with you despite how fast you can go for the most part. Though is some levels there are so many chevron speed boosts that a decent player can lap every single other cart (meaning you beat the 3 laps before the carts manage to do 2).

Without doubt, the most fun part of the game by far.

There's lots of choice within the game, you've 20 different tracks for a start, 4 different cups to race through and multiple engine sizes from 50cc to 150cc which gives a higher/faster challenge with more aggressive AI opponents, which the last set of tracks are notoriously difficult and have the deadly Rainbow Road, which means you've got to keep on the track fully as there's no walls to bounce off and the Thwomps are invincible (though the AI drives through them). However, it's early days and the fact there's so many different tracks leaves the single (and 2 player) Grand Prix mode with a lot of potential and hope.

If only that was all the game had.

You will be punished heavily if hit by something when 3-4 cars over take you on a single mistake

There's also the VS mode where 2 players race head to head on a track of their choosing. No other AI around it's just player 1 and player 2 gunning their engines and slowly trundling off before speed boosts and power ups begin to break up the pace of the level. Or use it as a chance to exploit cheats, explore shortcuts and generally take a less intense race at the game. But that's not the cream of the crop for this game.

That's the battle mode.

3 lives, that's it. Winner stays in, loser sits in the corner.

Simple, pure, fun. How best I can describe it. You've yourself, your friend/enemy in 1 of 4 tracks designed symmetrically (some of which are quite large) and a 3 balloons. If you take a hit, you lose a balloon and after a while the power ups replenish and the weapons becomes more regularly found and fired. You don't get the lightning bolt either but since the focus will be mostly on weapons like green and red shells, you're either playing ricochet with the bouncing green shells or you're trying to bank shots around corners after your opponent with the curving movements of the red shells.

If you've a feather (or enough speed) you can jump the gap for the shorcut. Or fall.

It's fast, it's frantic and it's fun when two players know the level, can power slide around corners and generally are very capable drivers for a fun (relatively) simple game. Even this mode on its own is wonderful as it is, at times it feels like this is the whole point of Mario Kart and that the Grand Prix and AI racers are a tacked on bonus to what is a fun way to duel each other to do the deflation.

Dreamcast RUSH 2049

Years ago, games on particularly older systems would either be a one-shot gimmick with the focus being upon the main engine of the game. Or the game would be a mishmash of multiple game types with each game type being played drastically differently. One moment you'd be throwing darts in a pub and the next, abseiling down a canyon while avoiding the sides but going too quickly makes you fall and going too quickly gets you set on fire.  Sometimes the games would be hugely different in their game play from one even to another and today would be considered to be just a series of mini-games. Other games took the main engine of the game and adjusted it to similar game types but different ways of playing it. This game is the latter of that type of multigame.

This game is effectively 3 games in one based around cars.

Game Makers and Gamers have often wanted more and bigger and better thrills in race. Top down view wasn't enough so let us have first person views on race tracks. That not enough? Ok let's have other cars on the track we can race against, on top of that let’s have multiple players playing. Sprites not enough, let's upgrade to polygons. Racing not enough? Let's throw in weapons and guns. That not enough, let's have furiously quick game play, huge jumps and leaps, traps, tricks and explosions. That still not enough? How about WINGS!

Ok... now we're talking San Francisco Rush 2049.

The Rush series of games have built up on racing around cityscapes, using shortcuts triggered by buttons in out-of-the-way places and having some crazy jumps and leaps. This game goes beyond that with the fun side of things by allowing the cars to sprout planes while airborne to help stabilise, balance and trick out some mad moves by spinning, endo-ing and flipping here there and everywhere.

As said at the start, there are essentially 3 games here. However your profile/car can be modified with tyres, frames, engines etc to change the performance of the vehicles. All of these unlocked by winning races and circuit sets, travelling distances in miles/kilometres and collecting coins. Yep even this game has a collecting session. Each level/track has 8 silver and 8 gold coins. The silvers tend to be easier to collect while the golds are often awarded for finding the most hidden, out of the way places, or performing the largest leaps at very specific speeds and angles and usually requires the most powerful engines and lightest frames to reach them.

The main game is racing. Multiple tracks set in and around a futuristic San Francisco scene with booster tracks, short cuts under mountains, through construction yards, loop the loops, corkscrews and death defying leaps of amazing views. You start with 5 other vehicles and once you're racing, how you get to the finish line is up to you. Race the usual track and try to beat the other racers or take the short cuts to get ahead and secure more points and positions, which becomes essential when the other cars out class you. The downside to the shortcuts is that if you fail to beat the shortcut you'll end up crashing and being put back on the track with a slower speed and usually a fair bit behind where you'd be normally. Quite a drawback when the shortcut usually isn't much of a boost, save for the rare one or two that take big chunks off the tracks. Others are substantially difficult to judge as they have loops that take you back before taking you forwards.

The second main game mode is a stunt track. Several levels (with 8 gold and 8 silver coins each) designed with lots of jumps and leaps, boosts and such to get the players into the air quickly and for long durations to perform tricks. The more variation of a trick in a jump, the bigger the multiplier. You can either play solo to try and gain score or go head to head with multiplayer mode to see who gets the highest scores. Cumulative scores unlock further maps and levels in the game. The more awkward players will cause accidents with other players to stop them scoring, fail to land the trick and explode and you get nothing for your launch attempt. Games tend to be 5minutes in length aside from changing the settings.

The final mode is the weapons battle where it's multiplayer only (or solo if you want to learn the level) where there's a selection of weapons for players to collect and use against each other. Each player has a pistol instead of wings while weapon upgrades include sonic blasters, grenades, lasers, machineguns, rockets and battering rams. With people getting either first to x kills or most within a time limit. No coins in these tracks, just flatter areas for people to battle more steadily within the confines of the level. Other power ups include shields, repairs and stealth/cloaking (but the missile will still find you).

There's a lot of variety to keep a lot of players enjoying the game for a long time, particularly the "must collect everything" players with the coins and cars, engine parts, tyres, transmissions (auto, manual, sport, pro) and even levels to unlock, and the ultimate challenge, The Gauntlet, you've got a few minutes to get through some of the toughest tricks and traps in the game before landing on a picture of the team, sadly you can't burn it up with some wheel spins.

Driving is a simple enough affair with tracks laid out usually quite comprehensively. Though some tracks you'll learn quickly that following the main road will lead you into a dead end, thanks a bunch. While some traps trigger hammers and walls that will quickly move in the way and kill the person who triggered it with a big fat smiling face upon the wall as a delightful little "fuck you, with love" from the game designers. Lovely.

Some of the shortcuts are insanely hard and not something you'd even consider at times, such as landing on a moving boat and driving back off again to get to an area that houses a coin. The coin being the ONLY reason you'd even attempt that. Which means to get the coins you'll be playing a lot of practise mode as racing isn't an option if you're taking such detours, several coins on one track are hidden in an area you have to glitch through or drive through on your side and NOT explode, and THEN to travel around a high speed ramp and jump area to get the few silvers and one gold coin contained.

But completionists... are a funny bunch.

The game and maps are designed in such a way that racing around the cityscapes feels like a while knuckle race through madness with every slight twitch and twist being the difference between death and the next position upwards in the rankings. Though you rarely do explode from coming into contact with the walls, often scraping them and still racing on, the involvement of other hazards like Tram Cars tend to make you blow up faster than a Pinto kicked in the arse. Usually the tracks are fair to the racers and only one or two traps encroach upon the main track leaving the risky stuff to those willing to take the risks.

The music is a rather inspired but esoteric selection of tracks with a few tracks that will really pay dividend to the ambience of the race tracks and further enhance the nitro fuelled race feeling, I tend to just leave it with the track Garage and go from there. While there's one or two good tracks, the rest are too laid back or too generic to really be noticeable.

And for the hardcore, there's harder modes with wind speeds affecting the play, fog, backwards tracks and mirror tracks (with their own shortcuts too) and even more challenging, Death Mode where crashing once will take you out for the race, but this includes AI racers and once all 5 of them are down, you've a quiet ride to the end (just don't crash into any wrecks, you'll be furious at that point as the player is always last if they crash).

As an avid gamer, I like this game for the variety, the lack of common sense in the levels and the wings. Serious petrol heads would be advised to steer clear (heh...) as it lacks the tuning focus of more serious racing games while kart racers may find too much of a focus on actual racing than the jolliness of using comical weapons. It fits itself into a niche rather suitably and has a little for everyone in the game.

And Wings.

Now I'm heading off to rev an engine, shout ""Rush" with an echo then taking my 8.0 litre V10 Pick Up truck to ramp off a few jumps at around 280mph.

Then I'm going to play this game again.

SNES Road Riot 4WD

With many games you realise what they're aiming for and how they went about trying to achieve it. Sometimes you realise that there were key issues in creating such things and that due to overwhelming restrictions, they tried their best with what they had at the time. Some games come through as being gems with potential that maybe the next generation of console would have been better overall for their intentions.

And some games should have been terminated at inception, with the proposer, the designer, the programmers, testers and marketing departments. Games so terrible and horrible that their very existence is a blight on humanity's soul. The type of games that you would never give someone even as a joke unlike any Barbie game, which just is a big playful slap to the face. These types of games however you give to someone on the understanding this person will, or already, hates you.

These kinds of games are the ones that earn people street beatings, in public, with their family and kids around.

I defy anyone to actually get this game and play it AND like it. A bold statement, I know, but this is one of THOSE games.

Sometimes with games you realise that they're trying to jump in the bandwagon and make a name for themselves. Mario and Sonic ruled the platformers series in the 2D days and while chars like Bubsy, Bug, Zool and such all took a shot at the platform crown, these two have seen off all attackers, staunchly. Likewise the king of carting games pretty much is the Mario kart series with occasional attempts over the years from the Kongs, Crash Bandicoot, Konami's random people (love the Pyramid Head racer guys!) Sonic even trying to grab a slice of the pie on the cart racing though Nintendo seems to have gotten this one down to such a fine art that there's few decent competitors for the title. Not those other games are bad, but the Mario Kart series is just so well developed now, that even good games are over looked.

This game though... I'm not which game they were trying to replicate but they fucked up in all recognisable ways and likely others I've never seen before in all my years of gaming.

As far back as I can remember, split-screen racing has been a staple of a lot of games over the years. From the C64 I can remember Pole Position, Kick Start 2 (already reviewed, thanks), Top Gear, Mario Kart, Gran Tourismo, various World Rally Championship games, and so on to name but a few that stick out in my mind. The Super Nintendo version of Mario kart being one of the most played games I've had on the console in my youth, but in acquiring THIS GAME I was sadly exposed to one of the uglier undersides of the gaming library.

This game tries to be a racing game. A split-screen off-road buggy racer that competes you and possibly a (soon-to-be-no-longer) friend, against each other and multiple AI racers on dirt tracks against each other. You've your standard, steering, optional gears (never played with gears in any arcade racer, I leave that to my actual car where it's FUN to use them), and an optional gun that shoots out to hit other racers to slow them down.

That's the idea anyway.

Let's take a look at the history. Myself and my cousin, hired this game from a shop going on the blurb on the back, looking for a racing game of sorts and this offered 2 player action, shooting the other racers and seemed to be presented fairly well. I should note this was back before the internet was available and people could readily access reviews and such websites. If they were available I'd have gone straight online and sought the names and addresses of all the people involved and tortured them badly with a whole assortment of things from my garden shed. Most likely the spiders.

This is also likely why the internet wasn't invented sooner, to wait for me to stop wanting these people gone.

So we took this game and paid our rental (I know, renting SNES games, those were the days) and ended up heading home to slap the game into the console and booting it up. Already the cracks were starting to show. The game's presentation was very weak, nothing really being done within the game to showcase what it could do or what it offered. The music was an assault upon the ears and we opted to play the game with the sound down on our little TV. A first for gaming.

Then we started playing it and that's probably where my inspiration came to actually review games, sadly one I realised only recently but better late than never.

The game sets up, gets ready to play and looks like the usual split screen affair of games at the time like Top Gear and Mario kart and that's really where the game differs. The frame rate stutters along like a backfiring scrap heap of a car. The refresh rate is so slow that by the time someone has been seen they're already processed as have over taken you and gone into the distance, your only time to see someone is when you fly past them, they fly past you, or you're level with them very briefly. Shooting at them is beyond a joke, you can't aim accurately with the limited frames of animation of your vehicle and with slow refresh and lowered frame rate, and your bullet is there for a second and gone. Even successfully hitting someone slows them down so slightly that it barely seems to have done anything and when you stop shooting them, they speed right back up to what they were before the change. So the one extra function in a racing game to help you overtake; lets you pull level at the MOST effective it can be.

This game was clearly rushed.

The levels and races are bland and repetitive, backgrounds and the tracks themselves are indistinct from each other and the music grates heavily upon the brain with its awful synths best left to crappy old Midi libraries labelled under "What the fuck were we thinking".

As I mentioned earlier in the review, sometimes you realise that games were made with a lack of firepower and strength that later generations of consoles could manage. Sometimes you play a game realise that split screen tends to be slower and missing something that full screen has. In some games a full screen, single player mode, has a remarkably better refresh rate than the split screen and usually more detail. This games HAS NO SINGLE PLAYER SCREEN. The single player mode is just the fucking multiplayer mode while the bottom half follows one particular AI racer.

There was never any attempt to overcome the trials and tribulations of the hardware limitations, it's a shitty, hastily made, mash up of code that likely was hacked together and slashed out as a means of simply putting out SOMETHING that had racing in it to try and get in on the fat cow of kart racing that was being used. I'm hugely grateful that the £1 I spent hiring the game would have gone to the lovely people who ran the shop rather than the spluttering shit-fest of a company that published this dross.

My sympathies go to those that spent a full £30 or £40 on this pile of dogshit. If anyone has a copy of this game, please send me vids of you destroying it for the good of future generations.