Formula One: Built to Win (NES) Playthrough
179A playthrough of Seta's 1990 license-based racing game for the NES, Formula One: Built to Win.
Formula One: Built to Win puts you in the shoes of a starry-eyed street racing novice who is determined to claw his way to the top of the professional racing world. It's a zero-to-hero journey through "a world of sweat and sacrifice where split second reflexes and the ultimate in technology are essential in attaining the victory that can only be achieved when man and machine function as one. An arduous, step by step process known to these driven few as... 'Built to Win.'"
You start out your career by competing in a few small-time, D-class events in New York and pouring your winnings into upgrades for your Mini Cooper. Once New York has been conquered, you'll move on to Detroit and Miami in search of bigger opportunities and a shot at the C-class rank, which opens the doors to higher stakes races, higher performance parts, and even a new car - a Vector W2 - providing you've saved up enough cash. (The Las Vegas casino's generous payouts can speed this process up considerably).
You continue like this through thirty races spread across ten cities, and if you take first with your tricked out Ferrari F40 at the A-class "Final Road" event in Hawaii, you'll be invited to participate in the Formula One World Championship that spans sixteen grueling races on tracks that mirror the layouts of their real-life counterparts. Win, and you'll be declared the "world's fastest man." Dream accomplished. Lose, and... well, there's always tomorrow, right?
Formula One: Built to Win is fairly obscure as far as NES racing games go, but that's hardly a surprise: the title is super generic, there's no celebrity endorsement, it saw little coverage in magazines, and the box art was positively ghastly.
But the surprising thing about F1:BTW is that it's excellent. It blends the arcade style gameplay of Rad Racer (https://youtu.be/2nTdJF8TuuE) with simulation and RPG elements to great effect. There's a lot of substance to sink your teeth into here, the scale and scope of the campaign is plenty ambitious for an NES game, and the execution is solid. The controls are good, the track designs are fun, the road animation is smooth and conveys a fair sense of speed, the gameplay loop is addictive, and since the cart uses battery-backed memory to store up to three save files, there are no passwords to worry about.
Formula One's flat, single-plane background images don't look as nice as the multi-layered scrolling vistas from the Rad Racer games, and the music is at its best when it's turned off, but those are the only negatives that stuck out to me. The presentation sends the message that Formula One was not a big budget production from a major studio, but it's more than good enough to get the job done.
And in all fairness, this is far better than I'd have expected from Winky Soft. F1:BTW was the company's second NES game released in North America. The first was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (https://youtu.be/7h3myWWp_rY), and wow, talk about whiplash! The gulf in quality between the two is enormous.
So yeah, if racing games are your thing, I'd absolutely recommend checking out Formula One: Built to Win.
(I've gotta say again, though: that box art! I can't get over it! I was laughing so hard that I had tears looking at the Predator-vision color job on the cars. And who needs Lasik when you could just stare at that neon yellow background for a few seconds?)
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