28th March 2010, 12:13 PM
So I got this yesterday of course, and beat all three circuits on Medium difficulty today. It's a pretty good game. It's a Mario Kart clone, sure, but it's a good one, and isn't exactly like Mario Kart. There are no ranged weapons and no catchup, so you need to actually race well to stay ahead... the attacks are melee-range only. That makes it different from Mario Kart for sure. Also the tracks aren't as hard as Mario Kart's later tracks, and you can't go out of bounds or fall into a pit and have to be reset onto the track. This is good, Super Mario Kart's frustrating track designs combined with slippery controls are a big part of why I don't like it nearly as much as some people. Street Racer's tracks are complex enough to be fun, but not so much as to be really frustrating. That's good. It does mean that in the lower difficulty levels it's not that hard (see how fast I beat it), but turn up the difficulty and it gets much harder...
Also in the championship mode you only have three retries per championship -- fail three times and you start the whole thing over. All you need to do is finish in the top four of a race with 8 racers, but still, it adds some challenge for sure. The game also has good Mode 7 graphics. The upper half of the screen is pretty much empty (just sky), but that's better than SMK's permanent splitscreen. Other than the totally flat nature of everything other than the racers, it looks great. There are 8 somewhat entertainingly designed characters. The music is pretty good, and definitely gets catchy if you play the game for a while. There are 24 tracks (including 4 hidden ones that require beating the whole game in one sitting or a cheatcode to play), plus three different arenas each for Rumble and Soccer modes. That's a pretty good variety. Finally, the game has four player splitscreen multiplayer. In one or two player modes there are eight vehicles on the course in all game types. In three or four player there are just four total vehicles. Common limitation on the N64 too. So yeah, a 4-player splitscreen SNES game... Awesome!
It does use a vertical split, so all four people's screens are stacked on top of eachother instead of using a N64-style quartered screen design, just like Top Gear 3000. I wonder when the quartered-screen design was first seen? Was it really Mario Kart 64 or something? That is better than this... but still, it works.
As for Rumble and Soccer modes, they're the "Battle" modes of the game. Both are for 1-4 players -- yes, they actually have AI, unlike SMK's battle mode! Rumble mode is one where you try to bump the other players out of the arena by ramming their cars and bouncing them back. Fall off and you're out for the round. There are three difficulties, that determine how strong the walls around the arena are -- on hard there are no walls, be careful... :) Soccer mode is a half-court soccer "match", essentially. There's a goal on one side, with a auto-goalie bar, Pong paddle style I guess, going back and forth across the goal. The soccer ball gets tossed out, and the eight players try to grab it. Use attacks and such to knock it away from the other people, and try to shoot at the goal and score. First to reach the scoring limit wins (the default is 5, but you can set the number of points to win, or play a timed game, etc. if you wish. There are lots of options in this game.)
The game does have a few flaws though. It is still a Mode 7 kart racer, so telling which things are obstacles can be tricky when everything is flat. It took some time memorizing the tracks before I got used to that. Also it doesn't save anything so there isn't much reason to go back unless you like it. Also the reward for winning a championship is underwhelming -- you just see a screen showing the top three finishers with the number of points they got and that's it, no special animation or anything. Oh well. And I did beat it on Medium pretty quickly. There are four difficulty levels though, and while it's kind of easy on Medium (see how fast I beat it), the higher difficulties are definitely harder. The four player multiplayer helps a lot too of course. There's definitely replay value if you have people to play with. There aren't many 4-player SNES racing games. The other major one is Top Gear 3000, which I don't have but really want. Top Gear and Top Gear 2 are both fantastic... but 3000 is futuristic and has 4-player, so really I consider it a must have, once I actually can find a copy. :)
Anyway, Street Racer is a pretty good game. Try it out if you can find it.
Oh, Ubisoft released other games with the same title on other platforms in the 1994-1996 timeframe. Other than this SNES game, there's also a completely different, Europe-only Genesis game (it's pretty good, but plays more like an Outrun than Mario Kart, thanks to the Genesis not having Mode 7... stiill, for the Genesis it's pretty impressive looking really), a Game Boy game (don't know much about this one), and finally one on the PC, Playstation, and Saturn (though the Saturn version was only released in Europe and Japan, the US did get it on PC and PSX). That latter title has 8-player splitscreen on both the Saturn and PSX, impressively enough... I'd like to try that one sometime.
Also in the championship mode you only have three retries per championship -- fail three times and you start the whole thing over. All you need to do is finish in the top four of a race with 8 racers, but still, it adds some challenge for sure. The game also has good Mode 7 graphics. The upper half of the screen is pretty much empty (just sky), but that's better than SMK's permanent splitscreen. Other than the totally flat nature of everything other than the racers, it looks great. There are 8 somewhat entertainingly designed characters. The music is pretty good, and definitely gets catchy if you play the game for a while. There are 24 tracks (including 4 hidden ones that require beating the whole game in one sitting or a cheatcode to play), plus three different arenas each for Rumble and Soccer modes. That's a pretty good variety. Finally, the game has four player splitscreen multiplayer. In one or two player modes there are eight vehicles on the course in all game types. In three or four player there are just four total vehicles. Common limitation on the N64 too. So yeah, a 4-player splitscreen SNES game... Awesome!
It does use a vertical split, so all four people's screens are stacked on top of eachother instead of using a N64-style quartered screen design, just like Top Gear 3000. I wonder when the quartered-screen design was first seen? Was it really Mario Kart 64 or something? That is better than this... but still, it works.
As for Rumble and Soccer modes, they're the "Battle" modes of the game. Both are for 1-4 players -- yes, they actually have AI, unlike SMK's battle mode! Rumble mode is one where you try to bump the other players out of the arena by ramming their cars and bouncing them back. Fall off and you're out for the round. There are three difficulties, that determine how strong the walls around the arena are -- on hard there are no walls, be careful... :) Soccer mode is a half-court soccer "match", essentially. There's a goal on one side, with a auto-goalie bar, Pong paddle style I guess, going back and forth across the goal. The soccer ball gets tossed out, and the eight players try to grab it. Use attacks and such to knock it away from the other people, and try to shoot at the goal and score. First to reach the scoring limit wins (the default is 5, but you can set the number of points to win, or play a timed game, etc. if you wish. There are lots of options in this game.)
The game does have a few flaws though. It is still a Mode 7 kart racer, so telling which things are obstacles can be tricky when everything is flat. It took some time memorizing the tracks before I got used to that. Also it doesn't save anything so there isn't much reason to go back unless you like it. Also the reward for winning a championship is underwhelming -- you just see a screen showing the top three finishers with the number of points they got and that's it, no special animation or anything. Oh well. And I did beat it on Medium pretty quickly. There are four difficulty levels though, and while it's kind of easy on Medium (see how fast I beat it), the higher difficulties are definitely harder. The four player multiplayer helps a lot too of course. There's definitely replay value if you have people to play with. There aren't many 4-player SNES racing games. The other major one is Top Gear 3000, which I don't have but really want. Top Gear and Top Gear 2 are both fantastic... but 3000 is futuristic and has 4-player, so really I consider it a must have, once I actually can find a copy. :)
Anyway, Street Racer is a pretty good game. Try it out if you can find it.
Oh, Ubisoft released other games with the same title on other platforms in the 1994-1996 timeframe. Other than this SNES game, there's also a completely different, Europe-only Genesis game (it's pretty good, but plays more like an Outrun than Mario Kart, thanks to the Genesis not having Mode 7... stiill, for the Genesis it's pretty impressive looking really), a Game Boy game (don't know much about this one), and finally one on the PC, Playstation, and Saturn (though the Saturn version was only released in Europe and Japan, the US did get it on PC and PSX). That latter title has 8-player splitscreen on both the Saturn and PSX, impressively enough... I'd like to try that one sometime.