Game:

The Duel: Test Drive II (1989)

Duration: 21:53

756 views

24

Car and Driver was released in 1992 for PC DOS. It was a driving game depicting 10 cars which you could drive in 10 locations - race tracks, open roads as well as drag strip and even parking outside a mall.

Main menu was stylized as Car and Driver magazine. You could read reviews about the cars and locations or configure your game on its pages.

Driving model wasn't stellar, but keep in mind this game came out 2 years after Test Drive 3 and Stunts, first NFS wouldn't be released for another 3 years (on PC). The game engine looked like was taken from Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer 2.0, game on which Edward Lerner worked few years prior. It supported higher resolution graphics though without 2d art (so no doshboard in hi-res mode).

While we mentioned Lerner, there were other well known programmers working on this game - Michael Kulas, who later worked on Descent, Freespace, Red Faction games or Matthew Toschlog who worked on System Shock, Descent or recently Overload (spiritual successor of Descent released few years ago).

For AI cars the game used clever trick - when you first drove there were no opponents. After that, they show up one by one driving cars you drove before. You probably know where it's going - they were your ghosts!

I'm using Logitech G920 wheel while the game is running in DOSBox - you can easilly configure the wheel in DOSBox mapper - put gas pedal as Y+ axis, brake pedal as Y- axis, wheel steering as X+/- axis and shift paddles as button 1 and 2. Calibrate joystick in game and you can use your wheel to play this old game.

Other racing games I have covered:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIku_oD9y-RC3io_76u4Zj9VbCrdDCs3R

0:00 Car & Driver Magazine / Menu
1:28 Segment 1 with some crashes
7:23 Clean Segment 1
12:23 Segment 2
15:54 Segment 3
18:45 Replay of segment 3