A little known DOS game amongst my gaming buddies, but one that I was obsessed with while I had my old '386. Be for-warned though that you will probably need some sort of CPU limiter to play it on newer machines otherwise it has a nice speed glitch and you won’t be able to control your car.
The premise: Set in the future, where car racing incorporate bloody mayhem and death. You buy your car and race against rivals for glory and money. You can fit out your car with all sorts of weapons, engine boosts, turbos, wheel spikes, ramming bullbars.
A little known DOS game amongst my gaming buddies, but one that I was obsessed with while I had my old '386. Be for-warned though that you will probably need some sort of CPU limiter to play it on newer machines otherwise it has a nice speed glitch and you won’t be able to control your car.
The premise: Set in the future, where car racing incorporate bloody mayhem and death. You buy your car and race against rivals for glory and money. You can fit out your car with all sorts of weapons, engine boosts, turbos, wheel spikes, ramming bullbars. I found one of the most entertaining things in the game was the customizeable aspect of your car.
But by far the most fun side of the game was the race. As I remember it was 12 or so opponents per race, and the races varied on entry price and what not. But shooting down the leader with missiles, or ramming that car next to you and watching it explode in glorious 8 or 16bit colours was satisfying.
The biggest flaw in the game was the actual racing system, it was a primitive beast. There was little to no need for speed control, and it all seemed incredibly binary during the races. Turning corners was like any dos game of the time, your trajectory was always linear so there wasn't any cool drifting, clever corning or even good racing lines. Of course, you didn't need this so much when your car was decked out better than anything Mad Max ever saw.
It has been a pretty long time since I played the game, but as I recall the shopping system for upgrading your car was pretty good. The weapon variety was great, ranging from spiked bullbars and spiked wheels, to heat seeking missiles and mines. The amount of times I ran over my own mines on the last lap after I had decimated everyone was quite annoying, so a lot of the weapons I avoided after finding the best mix. The engine modifications were by no means advanced, and it pretty much just changed your acceleration and top speed. What can you expect from a game made in the late 80s early 90s? They did have some challenging opponents, but they never seemed to use the weapons to the extent needed for a worthy challenge.
It is a definite try out for any gamer of the dos generation, but you may find after finding the loopholes in the correct weapons, play style and race choices you will be finishing a lot of races without opposition and cruising through the game without challenge. Sometimes that’s all you need after a long hard day, some senseless slaughter.
