![Commodore 64 Longplay [115] Crazy Cars III [Disk] (EU)](/images/yt/09/commodore-64-longplay-115-crazy-cars-iii-disk-eu-6wlbf.jpg)
Commodore 64 Longplay [115] Crazy Cars III [Disk] (EU)
123http://www.longplays.org
Played by: MadMatty
Crazy Cars III, a conversion of the Amiga original by The Trisomic Boys (TRB) and published by Titus in 1992
“Burn up the highways of the USA at the wheel of your Lamborghini Diablo in the Crazy world of illegal Saturday Night Races. Put your driving skills to the test across 60 different routes. Weave through the traffic, beat off the competition, collide with your opponents and drive them off the road. Avoid roadworks and most of all, watch out for those cops! Put your money where your mouth is! Bet on the winners and earn yourself a fortune to spend on entering more races and customizing your car. Many driving environments: City, dessert, mountain roads, falling snow, pouring rain, nighttime driving and more.”
This is an interesting game. I had it on the Amiga but didnt know it was on the C64. I’d have likely bought it being a fan of driving games had I known about it back then. (Before moving onto the Amiga that is). It’s well presented and much like the Amiga version but not without its issues.
The idea of the game is to race for money. Earn money to pay for high stakes races, upgrade your car and buy your way into the next division. There are 4 divisions and you start at the bottom. You need to work your way up challenging other opponents as well as other local racers. Each race has different conditions, difficulty and reward. You are free to choose whichever race you want in order to earn the most money. The manual states that there is no placement indicator (which sux..really) and that you always start in 4th place. You always start with two clearly rival cars ahead of you so it’s easy to know if you've passed them, but the third car .. It’s not always obvious if you have passed them or not as they appear as a generic car along with hundreds of others. It’s a big problem not knowing if you are in the lead or not and can cost you the race. You start with 9 Boosts but it is important to use these sparingly as they are very costly to replace. Once you have upgraded the car fully in division 2 though, you may not even need them anymore as you will be faster than all other cars. Another annoyance in the game is that early on, the rivals can get the car upgrades much earlier than you and if they pass you, they will zoom off at warp speed and you may have to use a few boosts to stay ahead of them. Once I get to division 1, I get the last few upgrades and then look for a few races to see how the night vision works. Unfortunately, i'm not sure if they are taking advantage of it or not as I don't know if there were any really dark night time races. The most interesting aspect of the game is that all the races have their own individual aesthetic and it’s unlikely you'll encounter the same one twice.
I’m playing the Disk version here that contains more or less everything from the original. The game uses a kind of fake Interlacing or HAM mode to simulate high resolution gfx by constantly swapping two low res images. I don't think I've seen it used quite this way in any other game. The amount of loading and disk swapping is really off putting though and would have really benefited from a modern Easyflash release. The game does have its share of bugs though mostly in the scoring screens where opponents can have impossibly high car classes and sometimes it says they have bombed out and yet are still competing. Overall, I think it’s a good game for the C64 with a lot more substance than most. In the video I have cut out most of the loading time which if left in would have added 45 mins to the video length.
00:00:00 Intro
00:04:08 Division 4
01:06:28 Division 3
01:34:20 Division 2
02:01:20 Division 1 -
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