Race Drivin' (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
162A playthrough of THQ's 1992 racing game for the SNES, Race Drivin'.
In this video I win the championship trophy on all three tracks, each with different cars. Then, at 18:17, I show a funny glitch that I stumbled upon. If you put the car into reverse as you're flying through the air, the car will fly. Who would've thought that the SNES hosted such a rival for Big Rigs?
Race Drivin' is known as being one of the SNES's worst officially licensed games. It is fiercely devoted to upholding the level of quality we've become accustomed to seeing from THQ, which is to say that someone should've put this game's head in the oven and turned on the gas tap.
(Sorry if that was too on the nose, Sylvia! RIP)
It's a conversion of the impressive 1991 Atari arcade game, but unlike the incredible prototype of Hard Drivin' on the NES that I showed off last week (https://youtu.be/9kIM8GOg2Ag ), this version refuses to make the compromises necessary to make the game run acceptably on the target hardware.
Though they didn't all share the same developer, all of the SNES conversions of Atari's 3D arcade games suffer from similar crippling performance issues - Road Riot 4WD (https://youtu.be/LAmlYVBAKzI ) and Steel Talons (https://youtu.be/UrLnC1HR0nE ) too, were nigh unplayable thanks to how poorly they ran.
Race Drivin' was developed by Imagineering, the company behind NES games like The Simpsons, Swamp Thing, and A Boy and hia Blob. The team commited to rendering real-time 3D graphics, just like the arcade game! ...despite the fact that it was running on hardware with a small fraction of the power of the platform that the coin-op was designed for. But we get barns that look like Monopoly motels, cars that look straight out of Club Drive (https://youtu.be/D_PGqVbCvU4 ) on the Jaguar, and even a single-lane tunnel with a truck driving through! Neat!
What's not neat is that it runs at about 5 frames per second. That's not an exaggeration - Vitor Vilela, the guy who recently released a patch leveraging the power of the SA1 coprocessor to improve the game's performance, clocked the average framerate at a brisk 4.77fps. That's right! Almost five!
*FIVE*!
So, I'd have loved to have asked the decision-making brass at Imagineering: was this a case of biting off more than you could chew, or was it merely the product of a "relaxed" work ethic? I can't imagine how crushed any kid would've been on Christmas or their birthday, super excited to get a brand new game, only to be met with this. I'm amazed that Nintendo actually approved it for release in this state.
But anyways, while it is technically playable, it's not terribly fun. The real shame is that it could've been. Even at 10fps it would've been smooth enough to satisfy people looking for a "real" 3D game racing game, but this is just painful.
At least it's super easy once you figure out how to coordinate gentle d-pad taps with the framerate dips. You can take most corners without even hitting the brake, which is a far cry from the "realism" of the original, and being easy doesn't make it fun. Just less frustrating to power through.
(And if you wanted to see the game patched for the SA-1, here you go! https://youtu.be/dlhwFv7BSvo )
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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