Game:

Road Spirits (1991)

Duration: 21:35

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With all the hullabaloo over Guilty Gear -Strive- and Bridget, you tend to forget that Arc System Works has been around for a REALLY long time and while "Guilty Gear" is what ultimately put them on the map, they've been making and publishing games since the late 80s. While they can almost do no wrong in the fighting and action game sector these days, they've tried their hand at many different things back in the day and, for a while, struggled to put out really great games or find their identity. Join us today as we explore some of the earlier years of their game development and publishing.

"Road Spirits" is, to put it nicely, an easier and less exciting derivative of Square's "Rad Racer" and Sega's "OutRun". Released in 1991 with publishing handled by Pack-In-Video, it is one of the earliest titles to list their involvement outright and features more than a dozen "races" around the world. I say "races" loosely, because you are racing against the clock and not against actual drivers... but I also say it loosely because you're not really racing against the clock either. You see, while "Road Spirits" allows you to choose from four different vehicles complete with their own dashboards as well as different transmission types, they only have the most subtle impact on how the game is played. Additionally, while you will be moving reasonably fast, the cars handle TOO well and even sharp turns pose only a minor inconvenience at best. While the graphics are somewhat better than Rad Racer, the game lacks the same illusion of depth and challenge factor of Rad Racer or OutRun as cars don't generally surprise you when going up hills (obscuring vision) and the game has a time limit so generous that you have to make it your mission to lose and can basically clear the game blindfolded.

While the game has a larger soundtrack than either game (its soundtrack is reasonably diverse, though not as memorable IMO), a few basic voice samples and about as many stages as OutRun, the game isn't as inventive in its design such as shifting through Day / Night cycles or presenting diverging paths and instead presents each stage one after the other in one long sequence. Ultimately, you don't feel as if you're playing Road Spirits so much as just going through the motions. It's not a bad game, mechanically-speaking, and has some decent audio / video flourishes with respect to the CD-Rom2 format (predating the Super CD-Rom2 format), but it feels a little pointless.

One of the things I've noticed about older ASW titles is that they're ball-bustingly hard or mind-numbingly easy with little in-between, but this isn't the worst racing / driving game for the system and is well-intentioned in what it has to offer. Regardless, I'll take Rad Racer (the first one, not the lesser-known "sequel") and OutRun over this eight times out of ten. As it veers a little more towards RR territory than OR territory, this is a modest substitute if you don't have an NES/FC on hand, but I can't say it's an adequate substitute for OR, especially since OR actually got a port to the system and it's solid (predates the Gen/MD version by about a year and released on the stock TG16/PCE). Nevertheless, it's a good introductory racing game for newcomers of the genre and not much else. This is a video of the game in action. Enjoy.

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