AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
4x4 offroad racing game epyx11/29/2023 ![]() You also get a lot of rivers – and sometimes something slightly wider than a river – on your courses. These are signified by a line on the road then the screen violently shifting, and most of the car disappearing off the top of bottom of the screen. There’s a lot of hills and valleys in this game. You also get potholes or piles of stones or exploding blades of grass or something to avoid (like a rubbish Buggy Boy), and there’s more obstacles on the track than other racers. That’s why you have three lives in a racing game in case you were wondering. In every course, the main obstacle is the cactus in the middle of the track every few seconds. You’ll find the garish monochrome graphics are perfectly complemented by completely monotone engine sounds regardless of the high or low gear you’re in. The sound doesn’t help with any potential suspension of disbelief. I think a lot of racing games move the track rather than the car, and this might be a very good example of why that trick exists! Which is precisely what you’re doing and there’s no attempt to disguise it. Driving feels like moving a slider left and right. Once you’re underway, you’ll notice there’s no car physics in evidence. Your car looks like it was programmed in BASIC. Winter is blue and white and is the only one you’ll have any recollection of choosing. Even the next multi-load is more interesting!įinally we’re at whatever race we chose ages ago. This bit looks a bit like a bad Everyone’s a Wally game, and is utterly pointless. Eventually you work out that you then need to walk right to the right edge of the screen (rather than walk to your new car which is parked outside the shops) and press fire to race. All of this is like a bad version of Ghostbusters. Then you can walk to the Auto Mart to buy extra fuel, springs and stuff like that. You can walk into the Custom Shop to buy a bumper and something else I couldn’t work out the identity of. He’s wearing some strange high-heeled shoes. You are then a guy that looks like a darts player from the eighties wandering about outside some shops. There’s several, there’s lots of stats about each, and again, it’s all very uninspiring and won’t make the slightest difference to anything! Same as rough desert, desert and mud & hills but white and blue.Īnd everything in every course is genuinely those same two colours – car, road, background, obstacles, other racers…Īfter some more loading (and it won’t stop there) it’s time to choose your utility vehicle. Same as rough desert and desert but green and black.Ĥ. Same as rough desert but yellow and black.ģ. ![]() From what I can tell, that terrain is exactly the same regardless of the description, apart from either one or both colours you get on the screen (you read that right) changing…ġ. And here we are! I’m not going to review it, but I would like to give you a commentary of my first (and last) impressions if you’ll allow!Īfter a decent loading screen, you’re straight into a very uninspiring list of the four “toughest, roughest” course locations and a helpful description of the terrain you can expect in brackets next to it. I do have that copy of C&VG, though my own recent history with this was simply coming across a very garish Spectrum screenshot on social media and being intrigued. I think they were both generous to say the least, with their main concerns being loads of loading, and its attempts to mix some racing strategy with arcade racing falling flat and doing neither in any interesting way. Maybe they spent all their time on vast improvements on the Amstrad version, because let’s be clear, the only reason we’re here is the Spectrum version stinks! Sinclair User gave it 40% and Crash were slightly more impressed, awarding 42%. That said, back in the November 1988 issue of Computer & Video Games, their 47% review of that version ended with an update, saying that US Gold were unhappy with the C64 release, and the Spectrum and Amstrad versions would contain “vast improvements” when they eventually arrived. ![]() In the case of 4×4 Offroad Racing, you can kind of see why they did it though! Very prominent screenshots from another system were something I became accustomed to when I had a VIC-20, but by the time I’d had a Spectrum +2 for a while I’d get a bit suspicious when what were clearly C64 screenshots were plastered all over the box.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |