Burning Rubber Enhanced (Amiga) - A Playguide and Review - by LemonAmiga.com
75Burning Rubber is a 2.5D racer released by Ocean software in 1993. It features fast moving graphics, landscape changes, weather effects and even a world tour championship. With a demo-like intro and smooth presentation, lets see if this title is a match for Lotus, or falls by the wayside.
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Production Notes:
Captured: 7th Nov 2021 (Music), and 27th Feb 2022 (SFX clip)
Narrated: 3rd Sept 2022
Note:
I think the game was released in two forms: the A500 release, and an A1200 (Enhanced) release; which requires 2MB of chip ram. Although I'm still not 100% sure of this.
Burning Rubber is not a game I had back in the day, but as soon as emulators and ADF archives made it possible to play old games on a PC, this was probably something I was interested in, thanks to the screenshots on Lemon Amiga. I remember the Utah Saints intro, as back when I first played this around 2003, I was still into that band. In 2011 I as asked by their manager if I would like to film one of their sets at the Wickerman Festival. When I got there, my watch was still on British Summer Time, and this was in the Autumn time, and so I missed the first hour of their set. Due to a second camera man, who I had hired, going off AWOL to film the festival, I was stuck in the dance tent with smoke everywhere, and so I couldn't see much to film it. I still regret this. After the show, I asked them about Burning Rubber, and they said they had a different manager at the time, and they didn't know of any deals concerning this game. They had an Atari ST back in 1993.
I like to show as much of these games as possible, as sometimes film-makers use clips of my work in their productions, and showing the whole game can be an advantage. I didn't expect this game to be so easy, and so choosing Easy mode was a mistake. The game is a bit harder that it looks until you notice the back brake lights coming on before almost every corner, and during the corner as well, just to make sure of the turn. The game was recorded cold and in one take, but on 27th of Feb 2022 (my birthday), I recorded a clip of the game in sound effects mode, with the 'marks set go' and the Lotus rip-off engine noises.
The comparison zone was a neat idea, so we can compare the actual car sounds. There is no high scores page for this game on Lemon for the mag scores, so I used the Amiga Power review as a popup; although you can't really see the fact that the magazine moaned about the game, but still gave it a top score.
Danscore:
It takes a lot to beat Lotus, Crazy Cars III, Vroom, No Second Prize, etc, on the Amiga. Many games have tried and failed, and for me, this also feels like there should have been a lot more to it. Sure, there is nothing broken about the graphics, the music, and the presentation. Everything here should give any player of fast driving games a reach for their pocket. For me, a veteran of Amiga driving games of every description, it just felt dull. Not anything specifically, as everything is of high standard. But the woman in the shop is just not very attractive, compared to the women in Super Cars and Super Cars 2. The road is not smooth, and feels like 15-18fps. The blitter objects don't look great with my emulator, and this is perhaps due to the emulator itself. But it would have been nice to see something unique here; something you could point a finger at and say 'yeah but what about...' Like lotus 2 has the puddles and the turbos, Lotus 3 has the course designer. CC3 had the cops, and Lotus 1 (and almost Jag) had the refuelling. Even 1000 Miglia offered a myriad of car parts, car damage, drivers, courses and weather, but here the roads feel samey, with no feeling of being deep in snow like Turbo Outrun, or with rain lashing down like Lotus 2 or Toyota Celica GT Rally. The Nitro is unused because there are no straight parts of the roads where you can use it. Wining a race feels unrewarding, and as all the computer players take different routes, you don't get the feeling of beating them, or racing them to the finish along side head-to-head. Instead you look up and see you won - big deal. With every racing game the feeling should be a slog - and the player should be punished for mistakes in order to make the victory sweeter. In this game, it's just a matter of watching the damage, and driving a bit slower if you have high damage. There is no water, ice, oil, snow, sand, mud, rocks, barriers, signs, or even any slow drivers in the road, so it doesn't even match Super Sprint in terms of peril Vs reward. It feels like a cash-in game of the genre, and something to tempt fans who loved these types of games. It almost worked, but for me even on hard mode, it just lacks that vital something to give it an edge. So lets give it 6 out of 10.