T-Racer (Amiga) - A Playguide and Review - by LemonAmiga.com
58๐น๏ธ T-Racer was made and released in 1994, by Virtual Dreams - an Italian software house put together for this one title. The inspiration behind this is clear, but is this more fun than Project X? Lets find out! This review is also a shout out to the NJenkin youtube channel.
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Production Notes:
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Captured: 25th March 2018
Narrated 20th June 2018
Edited: June, Aug, Dec 2018, February 2019
I'd seen images of this game on the Lemon Amiga database, but never seen it until the 18th of March 2018, when the game appeared on the Nick Jenkin channel on youtube. A few days later on the 25th, I had a go. Almost a year later, here's the review (quite a short turn-around for me :)). I had a couple of warmup goes, where I tried to memorise the pattern of the first enemies, and where the three powerups are; which are essential to collect. When I set the recorder going, I promptly forgot where they were!, so had to ESC and try again. Thankfully, the final try saw me get quite a long way.
When the show was rendered, I noticed it was very loud. So I reduced the audio a bit to try to balance it a bit more. The down-side to that is now it needs to be at full volume to hear it, and I usually leave a bit more head room so that people can turn it up if they wanted.
This review was moved around quite a lot in the play order. At one time this was game #7 in the order, but then it got lost, and I realised recently it was missing and put it back in the list. And also the release schedule of other stuff, like the much heralded 7-Part RIP OFF specials were all done and in the can before Christmas, and I look forward to releasing those after the Summer break (so they will probably go out this September). At one time they were meant to be released at the start of this year, for the big Patreon push, but I figured it was better to release them later, when the channel is quieter, with not so many AAA games. This game is one of those featured in the RIP OFF series, in passing, as I wanted to give it a full show all to itself.
T-Racer is a shareware game. According to Mobygames: "Influenced by Project-X, as admitted by the developers themselves." And "Dynabyte originally picked up the game for a commercial release. Under the publishing deal with them, the game was significantly altered, often against the developers' wishes, and reportedly extended to nearly two hours of gameplay. Despite the changes, Dynabyte ultimately decided not to publish T-Racer, causing Virtual Dreams to fall back to a shareware release."
Danscore:
The similarities between this and Project-X are obvious. Although from level 1 the player is treated to a very special background effect, in later levels this is missing, replaced by a simple star field for world 2, and a very basic 'demo-like' wavy pattern for world 3, making the game feel rushed or unfinished. It can be that this is slightly easier than PX when it comes to gameplay, but there is a lot to be said for collecting powerups to slowly build up your ship, rather than randomly fall over them in this game - forcing the player to shoot everything just in case it contains some super weapon, and risking lives for more energy. This makes sure the player wades into the action, but can be frustrating when 95% of the enemies contain nothing! Game speed is OK, and this doesnt give you too many speedups like Menace and other shooters. But despite the House driven intro, the voice speech samples, the hundreds of colours, and the bold explosions, this feels like something which could have been much better - especially if all the levels had looked as impressive as world 1. The Italian developers Virtual Dreams became Fields of Vision, and released Breathless, a game we'll be covering this series. I managed to find 3 review scores on this game. Lemon Amiga gave it 6/10, The Games Machine *Italian Edition* gave it 88%, and Amiga Format gave it a score in issue #73. I'd give T-Racer a 7 out of 10 as a PD/shareware game, but comparing this to a full price release, I could only give it a 5/10 as a nice try, but not quite up to par.