Features
Gameplay
It's got the 64 behind it, so you know Road Rash is the first of it's kind on the console, and it's certainly an improvement over its older brothers on the Genesis. The principal activity remains the same: ride and bash your way to victory at all costs. You'll need more racing skill than you'd think to stay competitive in RR64. The different bikes have different physics that you'll have to learn and each has its advantages. The cruisers are the Harley Davidson like road hogs that have great speed and acceleration on the straightaways, but can have a little trouble on courses with lots of turns. The sportbikes are nice and nimble but they can take much punishment and don't really take off like you'd want on the straight parts of the course.
The physics of the game aren't as impressive as some of the motorbike racers coming up like Excitebike or Supercross 2000, but RR does have its own consistent physics system. If you ride a cruiser headlong into a sharp curve and try to turn, your guy or gal will lean as far to the side as you tell them, but if you don't hold it steady and decrease the speed, they'll either topple right over, the back end will start to fishtail or you'll plow right into an object on the side of the course because you effectively have no control.
The weapons in the game are varied but with a few exceptions, they're all designed to take out your opponents in the most forceful way. The sledgehammer, pool cue, baseball bat, monkey wrench, billy club, nunchakus, chain, tire iron and spiked club all do what you'd imagine them to do. However weapons like the sledgehammer are particularly damaging when you swing backwards at opponents that are trailing you. The pool cue is the best weapon to use when jamming somebody's front wheel because of its length, but all solid stick-like weapons can do this when you're closer. It's a devastating attack that cleans the opponent right out instead of having to beat on them a few times. A great skill to master is weapon stealing since you lose your weapon when you jam someone's wheel. Using your basic fist attack you have to time it just right, when someone is attacking you so that you reach out for their weapon just as they extend it. Or you can play it conservatively and not use a wheel jam until you have more than one weapon.
The cattle prod, tazer and mace are great disabling weapons that are best used in conjunction with bludgeoning weapons. When you stun them with an electric zapper weapon, the bad guys start flailing their arms like Obi Wan Kenobi when he chased off the Sand People in Star Wars. While they're stunned you should follow up with a kick attack or quickly switch to a club or bat to knock them off of their bike and out of the way. The mace spray will blind the other racers and when they reach up to cover their eyes, their bike will continue straight on the same path. On winding courses this works well since they will usually run into something bad.
The key thing is that through all of this bashing and weapons switching and attacking, you've got to be in control of your bike and stay in proximity to your opponents while you're racing over hills, valleys and curves. Your racer seems comfortable controlling the bike with one hand and attacking with the other, but you'll have to learn to do two things at once. Attack and race. You'll get the hang of it after a little practice and you'll really be able to appreciate your skills once you unlock some of the faster, more stable bikes.
The single player missions where your quest is to win money for bigger and better bikes is the best way to train for the multiplayer games, which is where the fun begins. In single player games you'll have options to join up with the various "gangs" so that you can have some protection and gang up on others, but we recommend against this because bashing is the name of the game and it's most fun when everyone is your enemy. Bring 'em on.
The multiplayer game is quite addictive with the exception of the arena courses. If you choose to not have any computer players while you're battling your buddies it's best to use the straighter road courses. When it's just four of you playing, the curves and dips of the arena courses make it very tough to stay on your bike and you end up just racing in circles, trying to catch up to your friends after all of the crashes. Since the game is all about bashing on bikes, racing around by yourself trying not to crash is not fun at all. Also, the straight up Thrash mode is the best multiplayer mode. It's just like the single player thrash mode but with friends. The Deathmatch, Tag and Ped Hunts are actually fun when you play them by yourself in the multiplayer mode. It can be done. There's nothing like being in the lead in the Ped Hunt so that you get first dibs on those poor unsuspecting folks meandering across the highway.
Sound
The licensed music in RR64 is appropriate for the type of game you're playing, but if you're not a fan of this kind of rock 'n roll, you'll be turning the volume down. Interestingly, there's an option to set the volume for the music in both the gameplay modes and in the menu screens. What does that tell you? You can check out the sounds of such groups as Civ, The Mermen, Sugar Ray and Full on the Mouth. And those Sugar Ray tunes are nothing like the little diddy they did with Supercat a few years ago. The fact that there are words, genuine baselines, and specific beginnings, middles and ends to the songs makes for a totally different videogame experience. Now if we can just get somebody to put some Ike and Tina into a game, we'd really have something to get excited about.
Sound effects are another great part of RR64. Each swing of the bat or spray of the can comes with the right sound and effect. If you club Big Jim in the head he goes "Wuhuh" or "Ooouhhh" after you hear it knock, thump or ping against him. The grunts and groans are gender specific too. The girls make....girls sounds when they get hit. The cool part is when the cops are on you and you can hear them talking on their radios saying cop things. "ZZZ. Okay pull over. ZZZ." That's some great stuff. An unlikely little joy actually comes after a race is over. On the tally screens that show you how much punishment you dished out, if any, how much damage you took, if any, and any other special thing that happened, if any, you get cool little snippets of sound. For "Accidents Caused" you'll hear one of several crashing sounds as it pops up. For cops you wrecked, you'll get the appropriate cop radio effect or siren blast. It gets to the point where the number of different sounds you hear at the end is a better indication of how exciting the race was instead of actual numbers. You want to hear a nice collection of yoinks, ooofs and blammos at the end of a race.
Graphics
This is where Road Rash runs into big problems. The game just looks very dated because of the boring textures and bland colors. Even though it's on the N64 it doesn't look 3D enough for our tastes. The most realistic looking part of the landscape is the road. It's a nice road-gray colored path with lines on it. After that the trees, buildings and other structures are really simply done and have very little detail to make them seem like real world objects. It almost feels like you're racing cartoon characters in a cartoon world. The characters look like adults on bikes but the simple outfits --black shirt with blue jeans and purple shoes-- suggest that they could have easily been distorted and morphed into some cartoon-ish looking mascot characters. Yoshi Rash 64?
The backgrounds and courses only look flat and simply done once you can see them. That is, they have to come out of the fog and be drawn in first. The draw in and fog aren't huge problems in and of themselves, but it's the fact that once you do get to see an unfogged, drawn-in piece of the background, it still doesn't look very good. You wonder what you were being made to wait for.
The upside is that the frames are all there in RR64. The glossed over look to the characters, bikes and courses mean that the game can push a whole bunch of riders, even in the four player modes, at decent speeds. This was a most impressive part of playing the four player games. When you've got four human players going against a handful of computer opponents all wielding sticks and other weapons trying to bash each other the whole time, you'd expect some major problems. We put it through a work out and there were never any slowdown problems that got in the way of our enjoyment of the game.
VerdictRoad Rash does a lot of things right, with the exception of looks, but it still seems like a title that's easy to overlook. It may not be updated enough for fans of the game when it was on Genesis and so the feeling may be "Hey, I've already played this." That's the feeling I had initially. It's a fine multiplayer game that can really keep you and a group of friends occupied, clamoring for "one more game" as soon as you finished that eighth or ninth "last game." Beyond this multiplayer aspect, there's not much to keep you interested for too long. Mastering the bashing skills is about as engaging as it was on older versions of the game. The bottom line is, Road Rash is fun, but you may want to rent it and get together with friends to get the most value out of it.
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