Death Race (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
135A playthrough of AGCI's unlicensed 1990 combat racing game for the NES, Death Race.
The video shows my playing through three circuits (amateur, professional, and world class), and the final Gauntlet run, which is the only way to see the proper ending.
Death Race on the NES is an improved remake of the hugely controversial 1976 arcade game Death Race 2000, which was in turn based on the cult classic 1975 David Carradine movie of the same name. And before you dismiss it as being a throwaway unlicensed title, I'll say upfront - this is one of the best games the NES has to offer. Sadly, it's also one of the least known games to be commercially sold in the US.
The game play consists of taking your car, primed for death and destruction, through a series of races across the USA. You capture the flags set out across each track in order to open the gate blocking the exit tunnel, allowing you a means for escape.
Of course, a game called Death Race doesn't solely focus on its core Capture the Flag mechanic. Staring out, your car is saddled with a number of weaknesses - the handling is terrible, the engine is impossibly slow, and the guns have virtually no range nor power. As you can imagine, this is quite a disadvantage.
However, at the end of each successfully completed race, you are given prize money based on your performance, allowing you to upgrade your car's handling, power, weapons, and armor.
Your performance is rated by your completion time, the amount of offensive vehicles and structures you destroy, and the number of "gremlins" that you smash with your car. I'm not sure why they call the little guys gremlins, but the sheer joy of massacring them can't be healthy, I'm sure. Whether you've turned them into a red mist by running them over or mowed them down with machine gun fire, their bodies become a vital source of revenue when the results are tallied at the end of each race. Even more important are the missile silos and helicopters, which can both be handled with good aim and carefully selected missile loadouts.
Death Race follows an odd difficulty curve - most games ease you in at the shallow end and save the true challenge for the later areas. However, Death Race starts off brutally difficult, scales its difficulty back as you continue to buy upgrades, and then smashes you with it full force when you finally take on The Gauntlet at the end. It's not impossible - not by a long shot - but it certainly takes a lot of dedication and skill to see the ending.
As you upgrade the car, the very feeling of the game begins to change dramatically. At first your car feels like a poorly tuned electric wheelchair with a dying battery or a Ford Festiva - whichever analogy you prefer. It's miserable to use. By the time you've equipped the best engine, chassis, and tires, you can run literal circles around any and all obstacles, and it is at this point that you truly discover what an fantastically fun game Death Race is. The sense of empowerment as you tear around the stages outrunning missiles and pulling donuts to you strafe-fire missiles at helicopters and rocket towers is unbelievable.
And all of this with no slowdown and virtually no flicker at all. Even if the graphics are a bit simplistic, they're quite impressive in motion on the more hectic stages.
It feels like someone crossbred Micro Machines or Super Sprint with the first couple of Grand Theft Auto games, and sprinkled in some Carmageddon just for the hell of it. It's an absolute blast.
I was amazed at how little there is on YouTube featuring this game. The gameplay is quite addictive, and you'll find yourself coming back again and again once you finally figure out its groove (and stop getting killed within the first couple of races). It is extraordinarily hard, though - even by NES standards. Harder-than-Battletoads hard. Regardless, if you're at all like me, you'll enjoy playing it so much that you won't care that it's so hard.
For any game, that's high praise, but for an unlicensed title from 1990? That makes it damned near Godly in my book. It's hard to find a copy at a good price, but if you enjoy fun, well put together retro games, this one can't be missed.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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