Super Monaco GP (Gen) Review

I raised the trophy in Super Monaco GP mode, which I understand is what the arcade version consists of, and won and defended the title in World Championship mode.

Super Monaco GP mode consists of a single track. In order to win the "Super Monaco Cup", you have to place in the top 3 and then race on the same track in wet conditions. If your combined driver's points from the two races tops the list you win the cup. This can be done while using the automatic transmission, so it's fairly easy to accomplish this.

World Championship mode has you run the 16-race F1 season. The twist for this game is that the team you start with has a rather poor car, and in order to drive a better car, rather than upgrading your car, you have to challenge a rival from another team. If you finish ahead of your rival in two consecutive races, you are offered a position in your rival's team, replacing him. In order to truly beat this mode and get the credit roll, you have to win the title and then successfully defend it, meaning you'll have to race the 16 races twice. I found the first couple races to be extremely difficult, but that might have been me just having a really tough time getting a feel for using the 7-speed manual. Once I was able to change teams and thus upgrade my car, it became much easier. And once I got into the top team, which happened after the 6th race, the game became ridiculously easy, winning just about every race by 30+ seconds (all races in this mode are only 5 laps) and lapping up to half of the field, with the final race in Monaco being the only track that gave me issues with the best car.

Unfortunately, other than choosing from three transmissions (automatic, 4-speed manual, and 7-speed manual), there is zero customization you can make. And if you want to actually win the World Championship, you'll have to use the 7-speed manual, as the top speed with the automatic is way too low. It is nice that it gives you 6 different button layouts. It's unfortunate that Genesis controllers don't have shoulder buttons, as it would be so nice to have buttons for the accelerator, brake, and shifting rather than tying either accelerator/brake or shifting to up/down on the D-pad. I used the layout that has shifting done with the D-pad and there were many times when I must have slightly pushed up or down while steering and the game interpreted that as an up/down shift. Maybe it does eventually have an effect, but with only 5 laps, I never saw a benefit to pitting. I didn't notice any degradation to the car's performance, even after probably more than a dozen collisions with the competitors, signs, and tire stacks. You can only crash out by colliding with a sign or tire stack at a high enough speed -- collisions between cars will not cause either or both to crash out. Just about every track has only one corner that cannot be taken at full speed with only a couple having two such corners. Great Britain can be run completely at top speed. All of the chicanes can simply be driven through in a straight line, as well as many of the S-curves, removing much of the difficulty -- the only real danger being a high likelihood of colliding with a competitor in them if you take the straight-line path, as they will follow the curves.

Oh, and the password system... At about 5 minutes per race, it'll take around 3 hours to play through the F1 season twice to get the true ending. If you don't have that kind of time to devote to a single playing session, you'll need to utilize the passwords. The passwords are 64 characters long. Yes, 64 characters. With 69 characters (0-9, the entire alphabet in upper- and lower-case, as well as handful of symbols) to choose from, I highly doubt the passwords needed to be anywhere close to 64 characters in length. Thankfully, they made the capital letters yellow, which makes it easy to distinguish between a 0 (zero) and an O (upper-case o). To give you an idea of how ridiculous the password system is, there are 4,856,705,920,261,766,616,432,726,361,041,784,486,707,420,237,162,676,787,270,402,854,051,513,023,913,932,318,206,873,478,462,081,791,833,767,094,850,481,921 (69⁶⁴), or 4.86x10¹¹⁷, possible passwords, which is more than a googol (10¹⁰⁰). Just having 2 possible characters, a 64-character-long password gives over 18 quintillion (18,446,744,073,709,551,616 to be exact) possible passwords. Or going the other way and having a 2-character-long password with 69 possible characters gives 4761 possible passwords, a 3-character-long password would give 328,509 possibilities, and a 4-character long password would give 22,667,121 possibilities. Given how you can swap teams via the rival system, and with all the possible season points distributions, the password system might need to be at least 4-characters long to avoid the possibility of easily guessing valid passwords.

Having the entire 16-race F1 season, albeit in a different order than the actual 1989 season, is definitely a plus, as I couldn't imagine the game having any staying power with only the single track from the original arcade version. It would have been nice to have the actual track names, rather than just the countries -- this might require a license to use the names, which I'm guessing they didn't have, as all the team and driver names were changed. You know it's an old game when a race takes place in West Germany. Even with the WC mode, it just seems to be lacking something. Maybe that's due to my having played a fair number of racing/driving games over the decades and not having played this at or near the time of its release. I'll still put it in the good category and I'd say it's well worth a try if it's not very expensive.

My password to get to the final race (Monaco) of the 2nd season is (they are all zeros):