Original Release: Rare, 1988, NES
Other Releases: Xbox One (in Rare Replay, 2015)
The first big hit for Rare also founded a whole subgenre of racing games and is the spiritual forefather of kart racers
RC Pro-Am (NES, Rare, 1988)
Where to Buy: Amazon
How to Emulate: coming soon!
Review by: C. M0use
RC Pro-Am pioneered the “precision turning” isometric 2D racing genre, which led to quite a range of quality titles (from the Micro Machines games to Rock n’ Roll Racing) before the PlayStation and the polygon era essentially rendered it no longer viable. Mario Kart and its whole genre probably owes this game quite a bit of conceptual debt as well.
Anyway, the main conceit of this then-new racing style was to avoid oversteering so as to hug corners in a DORIFTO (and occasionally venture elsewhere on the track to pick up helpful items / avoid obstacles), but there’s also a pretty strong track memorization component. The pulled-in camera doesn’t let you see much of what you’re careening toward at high speed; there are some minimal indicators, like turn arrows on the track and a little mini-map at the bottom of the screen, but good luck taking your eyes off the action to make use of that latter element.
The limited perspective is somewhat offset by the fact that there are few ways to fully crash in a devastating way, and none for at least the first few tracks. You can’t run off the track in most places, you simply bump the edge with barely even a slowdown penalty (retracting wall traps later show up that will put you out of the race for a few seconds if you hit them).
Unfortunately there are a couple of big issues with the gameplay that don’t take long to start frustrating you. You absolutely have to memorize where the speed boosts are in each track and hit them every time, or you’re ngmi as the computer always will (unless you shoot them first, but that only works on one at a time). There is also some very obvious (and vicious) rubberbanding right at the end of the final lap that often screws you out of a position as the racer behind you inexplicably hurtles past you at ridiculous speed.
The game doesn’t have much for modes of play, just a linear arcade-style series of 24 tracks (the box’s promised “32 tracks of thrills” actually includes eight repeats tacked on at the end after the “real” final course). In the later tracks, the computer is always way faster than you and you’ll absolutely have to slow them down with weapons (particularly timed to run them into some other obstacle).
RC Pro-Am was definitely more enjoyable back in the day if you had a second player around consistently; the single player experience wears thin pretty quickly. It’s probably best to skip straight to the sequel in both cases. That title swapped out some of the cheap AI tricks for an upgrade system that requires smart choices of car improvements to keep up with the Joneses, and it also made use of the Four Score adapter for four player action.
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