Car Battler Joe is an interesting cross between a JRPG and a driving game. It was developed for the Game Boy Advance by Ancient and published in 2001.
In some respects the driving sections remind me of Tranz Am, but they’re much more varied and the car you drive is more dynamic than in Ultimate‘s classic driving game. In truth Car Battler Joe is probably more influenced by Origin‘s 1985 game Autoduel and Steve Jackson‘s post apocalyptic RPG, Cars Wars.
Head On is an early arcade game, developed by Sega and manufactured by Gremlin Industries (not to be confused with Gremlin Graphics or Gremlin Interactive) in 1979.
It was the first maze game where the goal was to collect the dots, making it something of a precursor to Namco‘s Pac-Man which came a year later in 1980.
Power Drift is a superfast racing game designed by Yu Suzuki and first released into arcades by Sega in 1988.
The game uses high speed scaling effects (similar to After Burner and Out Run) to generate the tracks and the cars on the road, and the speed at which you race is pretty startling.
The 2009 PSP version of Polyphony Digital‘s classic Gran Turismo is arguably even better than the original PlayStation version, and that is saying something.
A handheld spin-off from the infamous Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, this one made by Rockstar Leeds (in association with Rockstar North), and published on the PlayStation Portable in 2006.
This 1982 arcade racer from Namco is a hugely influential video game. Possibly the most influential driving game ever made.
Developed by Namco and released into arcades in 1984, Pac-Land is a departure for the Pac-Man series because this time it’s a platform game. And a pretty good one at that.
A 1994 re-imagining of the Dennis Caswell C64 classic, Impossible Mission, which should have been great, but due to some poor decisions taken by the developers it falls well short of the mark.
It feels like the developers haven’t properly understood what made the original Impossible Mission good in the first place…
Continue reading Impossible Mission 2025: The Special Edition, Amiga CD32
Published by Titus in 1994, Lamborghini American Challenge is a decent 2D racing game originally published on the Amiga under the title Crazy Cars III.
I’m not entirely sure what to make of Black Thunder. It is a remake of Tony Crowther‘s previous game, Suicide Express, with slightly different graphics and released a year later by a different publishing house (Quicksilva).
