Title: RPM: Radical Psycho Machine Racing
Release Date: November 1991
Developer: Silicon & Synapse
Publisher: Interplay
As I mentioned before, at this time US developers really weren't known for making quality games; on one hand, many games had very little innovation, with so many titles developed being sports titles or cheap remakes of NES or PC titles. They were trying to make a quick buck on popular genres or types of games. In other cases, there was just so much "innovation" that they came up with titles such as Drakkhen, which was just an overly complicated mess. This game, it seems, definitely doesn't suffer from too much innovation.
Background
Apparently, this game was marketed and touted by the developer as the "the first US game developed for the SNES..." but apparently this is unconfirmed. More interesting though, is the company that developed this game, Silicon & Synapse. What? You have never heard of this company before? Surely you have! It is arguably one of the biggest developers in the market today. Need a hint?
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Yup! The mighty Blizzard Entertainment started as the humble Silicon & Synapse, and would eventually make some of the most innovative Western platformers (Lost Vikings), action games (Blackthorne), and strategy games (Warcraft) of the early PC and SNES era. Their first game, though, as a studio, was this little gem that we will be playing today.
Under the hood, this game was quite a neat creation. S&S was able to increase the graphical fidelity of the sprites by developing a system called "high resolution graphics mode." The tradeoff was, though, that they couldn't use as many colors in the game itself, which is definitely apparent in the game.
Gameplay
The game is a simple non-isometric racer (meaning the raceways are on a slight diagonal to the player, and you watch the races unfold on a plane rather than from the perspective of the car). You guide your four-wheeler car of choice (truck, sports car, or hybrid) through winding and confounding courses with the intention of beating the other racers. Sometimes the courses will be muddy, sometimes icy, and sometimes covered in land-mines. Part of what makes this game radical. You run races, win money, and use that as a basis for your "score." It really is a pretty simple racing game.
The controls are pretty functional. I will say that I am not a big fan of isometric racers, as I find the controls to be really bothersome (and boy are we going to be playing through a lot of them with this blog) due to the perspective. I will say though, that the cars in this game do handle very well. It is easy to make turns, and they really don't drift too much. The cars, though, do drive super slowly, which kills any sort of thrill to the action. As much as the name implies that this will get "radical," the action of this game is never really that intense. F-Zero this is not.
It is really fun to drive your car off road and watch it instantly explode! Same result with the land-mines. There is almost no delay to the explosions, so your car will touch the grass and immediately ignite, which is pretty hilarious.
The tracks are pretty well designed to be complex and fun to drive on: they have little hills and ruts to make it feel less bland driving around the track. It is too bad, though, that the gameplay loop is really boring. You can race in a single race and a season, and ostensibly, the goal is to win races, make money, and upgrade your car. Well first, the upgrades are only marginal improvements; the best things you can buy are power-ups that remove tailgaters for the upcoming race. Your purchases, therefore, have only marginal impact. The races aren't that much fun to begin with, so with half of the gameplay loop defunct, the game really becomes a slog very quickly.
The controls are pretty functional. I will say that I am not a big fan of isometric racers, as I find the controls to be really bothersome (and boy are we going to be playing through a lot of them with this blog) due to the perspective. I will say though, that the cars in this game do handle very well. It is easy to make turns, and they really don't drift too much. The cars, though, do drive super slowly, which kills any sort of thrill to the action. As much as the name implies that this will get "radical," the action of this game is never really that intense. F-Zero this is not.
It is really fun to drive your car off road and watch it instantly explode! Same result with the land-mines. There is almost no delay to the explosions, so your car will touch the grass and immediately ignite, which is pretty hilarious.
The tracks are pretty well designed to be complex and fun to drive on: they have little hills and ruts to make it feel less bland driving around the track. It is too bad, though, that the gameplay loop is really boring. You can race in a single race and a season, and ostensibly, the goal is to win races, make money, and upgrade your car. Well first, the upgrades are only marginal improvements; the best things you can buy are power-ups that remove tailgaters for the upcoming race. Your purchases, therefore, have only marginal impact. The races aren't that much fun to begin with, so with half of the gameplay loop defunct, the game really becomes a slog very quickly.
Music?
The music is really bland and terrible.
Final Verdict
Skip this title. It really isn't that good. There just isn't enough gameplay variety here to make a quality racing game. Sadly the company that would be Blizzard's first game isn't really that good.
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