Road Fighter (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
621A playthrough of Palcom's 1992 arcade racing game for the NES, Road Fighter.
I played until I got a game over on Course 4 during the fourth loop of the game starting from Level 1. The game doesn't have an ending, so I figured that that was a good place to stop. There's nothing new to see beyond that point.
This video was recorded from the PAL version. Road Fighter remained unreleased in Norrh America until the end of the 90s when Konami included it as part of a few arcade compilation games.
The NES version of Road Fighter was originally released in Japan way back in 1985, so it seemed like a bizarre choice when it saw a rerelease in Europe under Konami's Palcom label in 1992. Did any of you guys play it one of those pirate multicarts? The ones that claim to be 10-in-1, or 75-in-1, or even 999999-in-one, where a glitched level of Super Mario Bros. or a single event from Track & Field constituted not just one, but several games?
It was through one of those that I gained my first exposure to Road Fighter. I was actually surprised years later when I learned that it was officially sold as an individual game.
I say it was a bizarre choice because, while Road Fighter met expectations for a "modern" game on a console in 1985, the same could certainly not be said for 1992. Coming out in the same year that Super Mario Kart and Street Fighter II appeared on the SNES, it's difficult to imagine that this would've been released as anything but a budget game - does anyone for sure know one way or the other?
But regardless of how primitive the presentation was seven years later, the gameplay still held up, just as it still does today.
There is no ending, and you'll see everything that there is to see within twenty minutes of turning it on for the first time, but a breadth of content was never the point. Like all arcade classics from the early/mid 1980s, Road Fighter encourages you to push for higher and higher scores as you improve with each successive play. The first loop of the game isn't representative of the entire experience - it is merely a taste of the challenges that await if you invest yourself.
The tracks are easily memorized, as are the placement of the vehicles and items on those tracks, but the real trick is learning how to make it past those vehicles without constantly wrecking your car. The farther you go, the denser traffic gets and the more erratic the cars' patterns become.
And this is where the game's real hooks lie. The first is the countersteer mechanic. Since hitting rails results in an instant, fiery death that costs valuable time, and since you have no option but to collide with something, hit a car that's in the way if you find yourself trapped. If can countersteer quickly enough to get your car straightened back out, you can often avoid being bounced straight into a railing. Just try not to hit another hazard if you go into a spin - the brake and a prayer are the only things that'll save if you if you lose control of the car.
The other notable mechanic, and one that is equally important to master if you plan to get very far at all, allows you to manipulate the cars ahead of you. Most of the time the red and the teal cars move in the same way that you are steering in, but they'll only react to your movement once you get close enough to them. The trick is to figure out the distance fron which they can read your movements - once you have it down, you can easily fake out an enemy car out by tapping one direction as you approach and then immediately hitting the opposite direction on the d-pad to go sailing smoothly past them.
It sounds simple, and it is. But like any number of Nintendo's early NES black box titles, there are enough nuances to Road Fighter to give it staying power. If you appreciate the likes of games like Donkey Kong, Popeye, or even Bump 'n Jump, you'll find a lot of old-fashioned fun and replayability buried in this one.
Random afterthought: though neither of them came close to capturing the magic of the original, Road Fighter had two sequels. The first was Midnight Run: Road Fighter 2 (released in 1995 in arcades and in 1998 for PS1, JPN & PAL only) and Winding Heat (1996 in arcades, JPN only). They're interesting relics for the curious, but they weren't particularly notable, nor interesting games. And the PS1 port of Midnight Run was... well, let's just say it wasn't the preferred way to experience the game. You can see it for yourself here: https://youtu.be/hl0DaO3DOPg
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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