Championship Pro-Am is an “enhanced” remake of the classic NES racing game R.C. Pro-Am. It was developed by Rare and published on the Megadrive/Genesis by Tradewest in 1992.
I’m emphasising the word “enhanced” here out of pure sarcasm, because – when you look at the game closely – there is very little that is actually enhanced over the original, other than the graphics. In fact: it is a very bare bones port and the Megadrive deserved better from Rare.
Rare‘s R.C. Pro-Am is a classic isometric racing game that was published by Nintendo on the NES in North America and Europe in 1988.
In it you race remote controlled cars around tracks in order to win points and stay in the championship. If you drop too low in the rankings then you are eliminated from the game and must start again.
Geoff Crammond‘s incredible Stunt Car Racer was converted to the Amstrad CPC by Pete Cooke, the man responsible for classic ZX Spectrum hits Tau Ceti, Academy, and Brainstorm. It’s safe to say that Cooke did an immaculate job of bringing this ace racing game to the Amstrad in 1989.
Penguin Adventure is the sequel to 1983’s Antarctic Adventure and was first published for the MSX in 1986 by Konami. The story again follows Penta, the Konami mascot penguin, who this time must bring home a golden apple in order to cure Penguette, the penguin princess.
This simple but playable road racing game was written by Alex DeMeo for the Atari 8-bit family of home computers and was first published by Activision in 1985.
Continue reading The Great American Cross Country Road Race, Atari 8-bit
A handheld conversion of the classic Megadrive motorbike racing game that works very well on the Game Gear. Game Gear Road Rash was programmed by Gary Priest for Probe Software and published by US Gold in 1993.
Micro Machines 2: Turbo Tournament is the even better sequel to the excellent Micro Machines. It is a single or multiplayer overhead racing game where you race different types of toy vehicles on a variety of miniature courses.
Continue reading Micro Machines 2: Turbo Tournament, Game Gear
This PC remake of the classic ZX Spectrum game, Tranz Am, was first released in 2008 by Retrospec. It is a reasonably faithful, “enhanced” conversion of the overhead racing game originally published by Ultimate Play the Game in 1983.
This superb conversion of Sega‘s Virtua Racing arcade game required the 32X add-on peripheral for the Megadrive/Genesis and was first released in 1994. Called Virtua Racing Deluxe, it had features that were exclusive to this version, and it also had remarkable use of 3D polygonal graphics that were outstanding for the time.
F-Zero GX is the successor to F-Zero X (Nintendo 64) and is a fast-paced, futuristic racing game featuring 3D graphics and challenging gameplay. It was also the first significant video game collaboration between Nintendo and Sega, having been developed by Sega‘s famous Amusement Vision (AV) team (with Shigeru Miyamoto acting as producer) – the same team who made the brilliant Super Monkey Ball series. In fact, F-Zero GX uses an enhanced version of the 3D engine that powered Super Monkey Ball.
The King of Grabs 