Original Release: NEC, 1989, Turbografx 16
Other Releases: Wii (2007), Wii U (2014)
A simple but quirky top-down 2D racing game.
Moto Roader (Turbografx 16, NEC, 1989)
Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: coming soon!
Review by: C. M0use
A top-down racing game with a lot of quirks, most of them not good. If you’ve played RC Pro-Am or the early Micro Machines games, it’s very similar to those.
You have a two-dimensional view from above, the tracks loop and meander around in all possible directions, so instead of pushing in the direction you want to steer you sort of guide the car in a continual turn using the up-down and left-right arrows depending on what direction you’re headed at the time. There are also grenades, machine guns, etc. that you can buy and shoot at your foes, but they’ll be doing it to you as well.
The races usually end up just being one huge clusterfuck because there’s no split screen mode, so if a car falls a full screen length behind the lead car the game just warps it right back up into the middle of the pack. Most races degenerate into blind luck as to what’s going on at the finish line due to this and there’s not much incentive to try hard during the first half of the race or so.
It can be kind of fun with multiple players (it supports up to five simultaneously) just for shooting at each other mindlessly, but going solo is an absolute drag. You earn money by racing and the game lets you purchase upgrades to your car between bouts, but if you hit a wall and die or somebody grenades you too many times during a race that’s it, the game’s over, there’s no saves or passwords or even continues so whatever you built up is right down the toilet. The steering and the games various other idiosyncrasies take a whole lot of getting used to and it’s really not worth the trouble when you could just be playing one of the many better racing games available. Oh, and like most Turbografx games, the music is pretty bad.
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