Prior to this, I'd only ever played this game at a friend's in the mid-'90s, but only the two player mode. I didn't play it long enough back then to get good enough to be competitive against my friends. I bought this from a co-worker through an internal classified ad.
I tried to get through the One Player Challenge on my cartridge, but after about 14 hrs, I resorted to using an emulator in order to use save states. This game would have benefited immensely from having either a battery to save or a password. With 24 races to come in either 1st or 2nd, out of 4 competitors, plus a 25th race where you have to place 1st, it takes a long time just to complete the races. Adding to that, you only start with 3 "lives", losing a life by finishing 3rd or 4th and only getting extra lives by completing rather annoying time trials whenever you win 3 races, I can't envision many people sticking with it long enough to win the One Player Challenge. There also isn't the option to run a specific track if you either really like one or want to practice. The way two player mode is setup, needing to end with more points than your opponent, with a point given by getting far enough ahead of the other racer to where the other player is off-screen, then restarting at where the point-winner got to, you can't really use this mode to practice. Also, you can't choose the circuit in two player mode. Another negative is that the track layout is nowhere to be found, so you're going in blind for every new track, which means you'll likely be losing your first try at a good chunk of them. Maybe if I was still a kid and this was one of the handful of games I had access to, I would stick with it. Not being in that situation, I just got sick of hitting a wall, having to replay the first however many races to get back to the wall to get more practice in (hopefully not making a fatal mistake on an earlier race, using up any of those precious lives), finally after several iterations getting past it, only to hit another wall 1-3 races later and do it all over again several times. This wasn't bad for the first handful of tracks, but when that wall was in the double digits of courses in, having to race that many courses to get back to the wall really made me think hard about continuing on cartridge.
As for the actual racing, the controls are tight. No issues there. The biggest issue is the obstacles. Not only does the area they affect not match up with what you see, most egregiously the drops of glue on the Warriors courses that will grab you about a car width to one side of the blob while being able to drive about halfway into the blob on the other side with no issues. Also, in order to get free of obstacles you've run into, many times you'll have to move straight back from it to get free of it. There were many, many, many times where I would be caught on a corner of something and be angled in such a way to where I clearly should be able to free myself, throwing my arms up in frustration about how ridiculously bad it was.
Being able to race in several types of vehicles, like F1 cars, boats, helicopters, tanks (which can shoot and temporarily destroy your opponents), and a few others is pretty neat. The courses being laid out on things like billiards tables, kitchen tables, sandboxes, and bathtubs is a nice change of pace. There's also the opening guitar riff from Deep Purple's "Smoke On The Water", with a variation at the end, that plays before each race.
To me, two player is where this game really shines. So, if you have someone to play against, I highly recommend it. I just think the one player mode is too frustrating for most to stick with.
