![]() Another feature of illegal races is that nobody cordons off the streets to block traffic for the racers, so you will have to avoid hitting pedestrians or run into cars along the way. Naturally, since the races are illegal, you will have to avoid or fight cops who will show up on your tail. If you don't have a weapon, you can even grab one off the other racers if you are quick enough. This means it's a free for all once you hit the road. The premise of the game is that you take part in a series of illegal races on roads across the USA. And you will need to learn those attacks quickly, because things get nasty in a violent-but-so-much-fun Carmageddon kind of way. You can perform a lean, a fast steer, and slow steer, and use three ways to attack fellow riders and cops: kick, punch, and swing. First, although it may be an arcade-style game with little realism, Road Rash offers more than a few ways to steer the bike. ![]() ![]() Now, let's talk about the good stuff, of which Road Rash has plenty. And I have already mentioned the lack of real-world physics, but that's a design choice rather than a flaw. The music is also horrible - you will most likely turn it off after the first few tunes (luckily you won't have to hear it, since this CD-rip is missing the music to save space). Very few things are drawn to scale, the background scenery looks like discarded Hollywood cardboard sets, and the riders, cars, and pedestrians are all very pixellated. It's laughably bad, and inexplicably so considering how Papyrus' NASCAR Racing series looked at that time. The graphics, by 1996 standards, is dismal. Let's get the bad stuff out of the way first. Not that it's a bad thing at all - even die-hard racing fans will have a blast driving up the wrong lane, slamming into passing cars, and beating cops around with an iron bar. While the game may sound like a 'realistic' motorcycle racing game ( Motocross comes to mind) - especially with Papyrus' name behind it, it is actually an arcade-style game that pays little attention to real-world physics. There isn't a good excuse for how little effort they put into the most important part, the actual gameplay.Road Rash is one of the rare gems that play much better than it looks.Īlthough very dated when released, the game's simple charm attracted a small but loyal following. And it's not a port of a Genesis game, it's new. It's not exactly from early in the system's life. The same bad framerate of the Geneiss games, no splitscreen multiplayer unlike Road Rash 2 or 3 on the Genesis, absolutely no graphical enhancements.Īnd it's a 1995 game, too. It's absurd that it didn't, the Genesis Road Rash engine never was that great (the scaling's only mediocre, and the framerates terrible!), when they finally had a chance for something better they should have taken it! But not only is it running on the old engine again, but for no apparent reason the 2 player mode is gone? What happened there? I mean, I like that the music's from the 3DO game - and you actually can hear the rock music ingame, unlike the 3DO version and its ports - and it's cool that the videos, menus, and interface are as much like the 3DO game as they could get on the Sega CD, but when you get to the actual gameplay, it completely falls apart, pretty much. Road Rash CD? Yeah, what it needed to do is actually use the Sega CD's scaling hardware. Something closer to the 3DO game, while "better", would be less interesting to me, because it would never be as good as the 32-bit versions (and therefore not the one to own). I see it now as the best version of the original Road Rash - and therefore the one to own (over the Genesis version). ![]() In a weird way, though, I think I prefer it the way it is. If they had done it a year earlier, it might have gotten the attention needed. Ostensibly, it was just a last minute, throw-together type release, with very little effort involved. This is speculation on my part, but I think also that it had a rather short development cycle - judging by the fact that it was a late release for Sega CD, was released to zero fanfare (even compared to other late Sega CD games), and is comprised almost entirely of recycled material. Sega CD couldn't handle the 3DO version's polygonal engine. I think Sega CD could've handled something with identical gameplay to the 3DO version, just with a downgrade in background/environment graphics. Sega CD has sprite scaling in hardware, but Road Rash CD appears to simply use the original Genesis Road Rash engine. ![]() While Sega CD may not have been capable of a port, with effort they could've done something halfway between in quality. My main disappointment was that the gameplay was pretty identical to the original Road Rash, when everything else (the between-race stuff) was all ripped from the 3DO game. The bands you listed wouldn't really fit the Road Rash style IMO. ![]()
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