This top-down racing game from 1991 has a driving career mode that, to the best of our knowledge, has not topped in racing games released in the years afterwards. In addition to accumulating championship points while competing against illustrious drivers such as “Ayrton Sendup” and “Crashard Banger,” you also have to keep yourself busy by badgering your sponsor for additional funding, avoiding the attention of environmental activists, and rolling the solicitors of wealthy relatives for additional funds. That reminds me of Derek Trotter during his years as a race car driver.
What’s more, in the world of Super Cars II, if your driving skills aren’t quite up to scratch, all you have to do is attach some homing missiles to the front of your thinly veiled Alfa Romeo SZ and point them at the exhaust pipe of the car in front of you. If your driving skills aren’t quite up to scratch, you can simply bolt some homing missiles onto the front of your thinly veiled Alfa Romeo SZ. Whatever much ammunition you bring with you, you will still need to prepared to deal with the precise leaps, blind tunnels, and unstoppable freight trains that interspersed throughout the several circuits. Formula One could probably pick up a few pointers, couldn’t they?
Arcade Version of World Rally (1993)
This was the most accurate version of an arcade rally game that existed until Sega Rally came around. The top-down perspective was chosen for World Rally, but the game’s primary sprite created by directly digitizing photographs of a driving Toyota Celica GT-Four. This gave the game a huge advantage. Or maybe photographs of a scale model of a Toyota Celica GT-Four, but at this quality it is impossible to drift hunters know which it would be.
As you slipped your pound coin into the machine, you treated to precisely the same start-up sound that Carlos Sainz Sr. would have heard at the beginning of a day at the office. World Rally also included some magnificently driving throaty digitized audio samples for the engine. This was a very huge deal because everything else in the bowling alley was emitting bleeps and bloops at the same time.
The cabinet had just one pedal, which was the driving accelerator, but to tell you the truth, it was all that necessary to start even the largest slides that could found outside of a Florida water park. Your toybox-sized Celica whinnied through increasingly rapid-fire sequences of chicanes, hairpins, and large piles of logs, which are the rally car’s natural nemesis.
Spy Hunter – Arcade (1983)
If you were to ask any youngster who grew up in the 1980s what they wanted to be when they got older, the answer you would most likely get is “racing driver” followed by “spy.” This top-down arcade classic merged the two most driving glamorous jobs in the world into one, and as a result, it became an immediate hit. The objective was straightforward: sneak past unaware commuters and eliminate the villains using oil slicks, smoke screens, and regular bullets, all while listening to a stripped-down version of the Peter Gunn theme from the Blues Brothers that played on a loop in the background. Excellent material.
Cruis’n Blast – Arcade (2017)
The Cruis’n series had a successful comeback in 2017 with the release of Cruis’n Blast, which earned legendary status among lovers of arcade racing games as well as pedants who are particular about the placement of apostrophes, but for quite different reasons. Blast a barely contained adrenaline rush the likes of driving which we haven’t seen in decades. It takes the arcade racing sensibilities of the 1990s and applies contemporary visual technology to them. It then lathers the entire thing in more neon lights than a Las Vegas casino. In addition, there are dinosaurs because, well, duh, there would be.
It made its debut in 2017 at amusement arcades, and more recently, it has transferred to the Nintendo Switch. This means that you no longer need to put pound coins into the game in order to continue playing, and you may rub driving doorhandles with up to three of your friends on split screen. There is no breach of contract here; on the contrary, it is a tremendous amount of fun.
Amiga and Atari ST versions of Stunt Car Racer (1989)
“So the vehicle is kind of like a hot rod, but the tracks are all like roller coasters, and when you fire up the turbo it looks like you’re pushing a BBQ down a hill,” the commentator said. Obviously, we weren’t there, but that’s pretty driving much how we believe racing game veteran Geoff “Grand Prix” Crammond presented this outlandish endeavor to Microprose, the company that published the game. However, crafty old Geoff built the entire thing in 3D, and as a result, not only was Stunt Car Racer a fantastic game, but also Geoff was able to avoid burned at the stake as a witch since the game released in the late 1980s.
PlayStation game called Driver (1999)
Being the villain all of a sudden became the cool thing to do in video games in a significant manner somewhere in the late 1990s. This was one of the games that helped make it happen, along with Grand Theft Auto. It cast you in the role of driving a bold getaway driver taken straight from a heist movie set in the 1970s.
Nevertheless, for other people, the storyline-driven missions were merely a sideshow, and the real appeal was the ability to blast driving through faithful-ish 3D renditions of New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Miami for the first time. This was the true draw. This was the classic Hollywood vehicle pursuit simulator due to its wallowy suspension, wayward hubcaps, and alleyways that lavishly filled with destructible boxes.
Arcade version of Night Driver (1976)
Indeed, you read it correctly; there is no joking around. Never mind the fact that the engine sounds like digital flatulence, never mind the boozy handling, and never mind the fact that they probably only called it Night Driver because black was the only color they could make the background; we wouldn’t have had driving Forza or Gran Turismo if it weren’t for games like this leading the way. We going to gloss over the fact that the automobile even a component of the on-screen display; rather, it a plastic overlay that had affixed to the interior of the cabinet. After all, Night Driver released before Star Wars.
Rock ‘n’ Roll Racing – Mega Drive and SNES (1993)
This racer may not have received as much attention as it deserved since it published in the same year as the all-conquering Super Mario Kart. This may somewhat explained by the fact that Super Mario Kart released in driving the same year. One of the game’s major strengths was its range of vehicles, which included hovercraft, tanks, and monster trucks. Each of these types of vehicles handled considerably differently. Rockets, oil slicks, and mines were some of the weapons at your disposal, and they were all equally exciting to use on your enemies in order to reduce them to smoking heaps of wreckage. In addition to that, it came with a killer soundtrack, as its name indicates.
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