The Wonder Years 6.12.08: Week 59 - Rock n' Roll Racing

Posted by Owain J. Brimfield on 06.12.2008

For those about to rock (and race), we salute you.

Welcome to the column where all gamers of a certain age come to wallow in 16-bit nostalgia. I'm your host, Owain J. Brimfield, and I'll be discussing some of the hidden gems and instant classics of gaming's golden era. Some of these games may crop up in downloadable form at some point; some may be consigned to the annals of history. Either way, they're worth tracking down if you missed them first time round, or replaying if you were lucky enough to catch them. Let's take a trip to:

ROCK N' ROLL RACING

(Interplay, Genesis & Super NES, 1993)

Rock n' roll and video games are essentially a match made in heaven, or perhaps more appropriately, hell. Many and manifold where the games of the 8- and 16-bit consoles that featured a driving rock soundtrack, albeit more often than not rendered in MIDI - if there's one sound that's more likely than anything else to be indelibly burned into the cortex of a 90s gamer, it's the idiosyncratic tone of a MIDI overdriven guitar busting out some classic riffs and outrageous solos as, say, Mega Man defeats a horde of rampaging Mavericks, or E. Honda squares off against Guile. So it wasn't a huge of leap of faith to envision a game "soundtracked" by some genuine rock and metal classics, and while technology wasn't yet sufficient to reach the videogame score zenith of Slayer's 'Raining Blood' featuring in GTA: Vice City, it was certainly good enough to knock up some faithful renditions of old-school rock classics and use them as the backdrop to what was, at the time, the coolest racing game in town - Rock n' Roll Racing. Although by no means the first game to employ the use of synthesized rock songs (hell, Doom was ripping off Pantera tunes several years earlier), it was certainly the earliest I could remember that actually made a whole big deal about their inclusion, to the point that it almost seemed like the sole reason for the game's existence.

The actual premise of Rn'R is, as with all the best games, rather simple, so that even fans of the devil's music might be able to comprehend it. Working in pretty much the manner of "NASCAR in space with weapons", all the fun and frolics that you might expect ensue from that conceit. Choosing from a pool of six alien racers, including Cyberhawk who for some reason always reminds me of Feathers McGraw (a hidden seventh character, Olaf, is a guest appearance from another of developer Silicon & Synapse's titles, focusing on a trio of astray Scandinavians - yeah, you know the one), before visiting the auto-shop run by Fast Eddie, no doubt named in tribute to the Motorhead guitarist of the same name, gamers take to the isometric tracks of a variety of different planets in a bid to earn both money to upgrade the vehicles, and points to buy passage to more difficult events. Of course, this being in the future and with everything rocked out and all, there's an immensely satisfying emphasis on weaponry and blowing the hell out of your opponent with everything from plasma rifles to mines. Hey, if you're after subtlety, you'll have to look elsewhere.

Although the game has only a championship mode (for one or two players, though, although make sure to play with an equally skilled partner as you'll only progress at the rate of the crappiest gamer in play), it's satisfyingly diverse, with a range of different upgrades available to your vehicle over the course of the game, running the gamut from engines to shock absorbers. Each planet you visit is divided into two Divisions - starting out in Division B, you need to amass enough points to move up to Division A, and from there onwards to the next of the six planets (well, only the first three are available to wusses choosing "Rookie" difficulty, but when you've got a setting called something as manly as "Warrior", why would you want to choose anything else? Oh, maybe because the game is actually pretty tough...). Each planet offers in the region of a dozen different tracks and special local driver to challenge, along with your other two standard AI opponents, Rip and Shred. In another neat reference, the local driver's car is usually colored a dark shade of purple. Geddit?!

Yes, because Deep Purple feature on the game's soundtrack. Now, I'm going to have to admit, I've got a long-standing complaint with Rn'R for the degree to which it places the emphasis on the rock choons on offer. Yes, they're all rather good, and the quality of the MIDI renditions is certainly above par. But, and here's the kicker, there're only actually six different songs which soundtrack the entire game, and I have to question whether the teenage target demographic for this game on its original release had ever even heard of George Thorogood or Peter Gunn. Personally, I love MIDI music (in spectacularly geeky fashion I even spent several months at uni recording a few dozen renditions of video game themes on the ol' geetar), but even I found myself getting bored listening to 'Paranoid' or 'Highway Star' for the umpteenth time. Thankfully, the game's in-house commentator Loudmouth Larry is on hand to liven things up with amusing digitized vocal stylings, the most unintentionally amusing of which is "Rip... is about to blow". Oh, and if I'm criticizing a game which is otherwise a gosh-darned solid arcade racer, there's a bug where if you save the game with over a million dollars in the bank, you'll find the majority of your funds erased when you reload the title. Much like that time I got paid, only to find out that my girlfriend had "borrowed" my debit card and taken herself out for the day. Ah, she does like the pretty things.

Rn'R is, admittedly, a game that's unashamedly nineties in its outlook, from the uncomplicated gameplay to the over-use of synthesizers, but also a great game for a retro experience and it's genuinely surprising to see that it hasn't seen the light of day for re-release at any point. The SNES cartridge is quite rare, although you can get a decent boxed copy for around forty bucks on eBay, but I must confess to not ever having seen the Genesis version - not even back in the day, in fact, as I had this game for the SNES myself. Still, I'm sure it exists in some fanboy's attic somewhere. I'd actually be interested to track down a copy at some point as one of the favored pastimes for nerds during the Nintendo/Sega console wars was always comparing the titles available for both consoles to see which one was superior. Not that I'm lumping myself in with the nerdy crowds, you understand, I'd be more concerned about a casual scientific comparison, or something. Either way, for whichever console you manage to track down Rock n' Roll Racing, you're sure to have a blast, even if you're into your hippity-hop music or whatever filth you kids are listening to these days.


Rock N' Roll Racing trivia

• Developers Silicon & Synapse changed their name to Blizzard and released Warcraft shortly after, and the rest, as they say, is history.
  
• A sequel, Red Asphalt, was released on the PlayStation but didn't do very well, probably because it was quite mediocre.
  
• Despite the game's ostentations, it's not quite as over the top as S&S' previous racing title, Radical Psycho Machine Racing, a remake of an old C64 title for the SNES.
  

The Videosphere

Let's take a look at this week's video highlight of Rock N' Roll Racing in action. For a game so predicated on its soundtrack, the following video provides a great audio capture of a selection of the game's score.




Reactions and interactions

To last week's The Immortal, which I'm surprised a couple of you recognized:

Posted by: holdemtim

"Classic game from my childhood years. Remember spending many hours on that one. Very difficult game, but I do think I managed to beat it. Back then I would play a game for 100s of hours if that's what it took to beat it. Maybe a review of Shining in the Darkness,Final Fantasy 1 (I still own it),Crystalis or even Sword of Vermillion (which I also still own), which had THE best music for a rpg in its time, hands down."

You know, I've sadly never played any of those three, although I do seem to recall that Sword of Vermilion was actually hyped a fair bit by Sega in their advertising. One day I'll catch up on the rest of the FF series. Oh, and congrats on besting The Immortal, damn tricky, and it does seem that the time of putting in countless hours to beat a game is long past.

Posted by: JT

"I remember this game being on an episode of Gamepro television once. They showed the solution to the final puzzle, which involved reading some "runes". I guess not many video game playing kids knew what runes were. I know that I didn't."

Runes are dried plums, right?


General indulgences

Every week in this section I'll endeavor to provide you, the faithful readers, with a fascinating insight into the various forms of entertainment currently dominating my spare time.

This week, I have been mostly enjoying:

Sensible Soccer, mostly because I had a lazy afternoon remembering that you could play full-on 90 minute matches. 64-57 scores for the win! Oh, and kudos Holland in the European Championships for whooping the world champions Italy.

Red Eye, Wes Craven's rather contrived and sadly inadequate thriller from the other year. Thankfully, Cillian Murphy saves the movie by being awesome.

Mekari, a local band made up of three young kids who knocked out one of the most exciting sets I've seen in a while down at the local last weekend. Great stuff, lads, you can go far. Anyone who closes the set with a ten-minute instrumental is top notch in my book.

and free lunches, which for some reason my workplace has seen fit to lay on all this week. It's funny, but getting some free sandwiches and cocktail sausages really enhances my productivity and raises morale. Or something. Where's the free beer?


And finally…

Thanks for reading folks; as always, reader feedback and suggestions are welcome. Next week in "The Wonder Years" - we resurrect a feature that hasn't been seen in a while, Ten of the Best! Until then - keep it real, keep it retro.