This game is a true MS-Dos classic. I used to play this for days on end. This game was the very first of the ‘kart’ racing games such as Mario kart and Crash Nitro Kart however it doesn’t often get the glory for inspiring them.
The graphics are pretty poor and actually make you dizzy it’s so pixelly. However once you get used to the poor graphics you can really get addicted to it. With loads of obstacles and pick-ups it can take some skill and is quite fun.
Throughout the races there are jumps, speed boosters, potions to make you invisible or invincible, make you tiny or everyone else tiny temporarily. You can even go underwater and have to guide the submarine periscope to get back out.
There’re 40 tracks overall and you can choose easy, normal or hard by picking different characters, such as Skunny, with 50cc or 100cc kart speeds to make it even more difficult. There’s also a 2-player split screen mode which is a laugh although it does make it even more difficult to tell where you’re going. There are 4 different racing modes:
* - Tournament where you race in different countries (tracks) and earn points for each position you finish and the character with most points after the last race wins.
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- Practise race which is basically what it’s called, choose from any track to practise yours racing technique.
* - Time trial, seeing how fast you can finish or attempt to beat the highscores.
* - Battle mode, against player or computer, each character has 3 balloons on their kart and the aim is to pop all three on the opponent using pick-ups such as missiles etc.
All these modes have highscores for lap times etc. which add an extra bit of competition throughout the game.
It’s such a memorable game, same as most old dos games the music is immense. Once you play it, all other kart racing games just seem like a total copy. It’s best played with joysticks, two can be linked up the computer. It works well using the keyboard too but makes a bit more complicated.
Since this was such an original game there aren’t any others like it from the same year as it however if you like this game there are many other more recent kart racing games such as Crash Nitro Kart or Mario kart. However another racing game I liked to play when I was younger was ‘Super Speed’ which is even simpler but is just as good so check it out.
