Developed/Published by: Electronic Arts
Released: 09/1991
Completed: 30th September, 2014
Completion: There are five different tracks and five different “difficulties” which loop endlessly. I made it to the highest difficulty and stopped. There’s no ending or anything so I’m going to count this one.
Trophies / Achievements: n/a
Why have I spent some time this last week playing Road Rash? On Mega Drive? On what possible whim? I really have no idea, but I guess I had a hankering to play one of these old-school, pseudo-3D racers, and I was always fond of Road Rash back in the day what with its scrapping racers and it’s EA, back when EA had that really cool logo, so it’s the one I went for.
(In retrospect, I should have picked up one of the delightful Sega 3D Classics for Nintendo 3DS, probably Super Hang-On if I wanted a bike-me-up. However, I had forgotten all about those existing. More fool me.)
So, Road Rash then. It’s actually pretty interesting! There’s not a lot of content, admittedly. Only five tracks—and to be honest most of them look the same—and your options are limited to eight different bikes. However, the game is wrapped in a “career” mode of sorts where you, unlike contemporary competition, don’t lose because you didn’t win (or you wrecked your bike, or were caught by the cops.) You just score some of the prize pot (or, pay for a wrecked bike or fine) and can have another go.
Except there’s this weird twist where if you do rank at least fourth in all the tracks, you’re immediately bumped up into the next difficulty, meaning that you can find yourself (as I found myself) struggling to keep up in the next difficulty because you just haven’t made enough money to buy a bike that competes. You really need to be coming first.
It’s flawed then. As is, really, the whole racing thing. Because the selling point is based on fighting the other racers, right? Fun! Except that you’re really not going to do that very often, because the tracks are tight, windy and you need to pay attention on the road, not on the other racers. It’s not the most nuanced racing system—you know, go fast, slow down for corners—but it’s actually a really nice engine, with a lot of things that these kinds of racers don’t include, such as cross-roads, significant gradients, and traffic moving in the opposite direction. In fact it’s the combination of the last two that make the game so challenging—nothing quite like cresting a hill only to smash into a car heading towards you.
It is nice, however, that the other racers—as much as the game makes you work to keep up—feel realistic (perhaps intentionally, perhaps not) compared to contemporaries. They also find themselves slamming into cars, and there’s probably no better feeling than sailing past a two or three bike pile-up (only to slam into a static deer that’s five seconds down the road, probably.) There some rubber-banding, but it’s not that apparent; racers behind you struggle to keep up once they’re out of your rear view, and crash basically at all and you’re probably not coming first.
So you don’t find yourself fighting very often, and are therefore mostly playing a very, very unforgiving racer. In fact I’d say past the second difficulty it’s really not very fun at all. If you were on Game Centre CX, where they’d probably say you needed to loop the game once to count it as finished, the best plan would probably be to just play the easiest level 25 times to raise enough money for the best bike and then try to grind it out. It’d be pretty painful though.
It’s fun for a wee while, anyway.
Will I ever play it again? No. But I could easily be convinced to play the later 3DO remake because I remember that being pretty good, if different, and hey, it’s got Kickstand by Soundgarden in it! I used to think that was the coolest song ever.
Final Thought: Is it wrong that I really want to play Skitchin’ now?
