Still Game? is an occasional series in which I replay a game from my youth, to see if it really is as good as I remembered. This week: Rally Cross Simulator on the C64.
Writing about Rally Cross Simulator is difficult because if there's anyone reading this under the age of 20 I first I have to explain what a cassette is. Or you can just skip past that and get to the game itself. That's probably easier.
Rally Cross Simulator is really old, really difficult, and surprisingly good.
Back then
There was something about buying a game that came on a cassette, something tangible that's been lost in this age of free flowing digital downloads. The act of going to a shop and handing over a handful of carefully saved coins in exchange for an actual thing seems almost quaint, but somehow the transaction carried more weight.
That compact package of cassette and inlay wrapped in a clear plastic box, tucked snugly into a jacket pocket, the spools rattling gently to themselves as you walked out of the shop. Being able to download gigabytes of data from the internet while doing any number of other things is amazing, but I miss a little of the old days.
Rally Cross Simulator was released in 1989, pre-dating the iconic Super Cars by one year. I knew nothing of Super Cars until much later, but looking back there are surprising similarities between the two, yet Rally Cross Simulator seems to have been largely forgotten by history.
Interestingly, it was written by CodeMasters, who would later go on to define the genre with their Colin McRae and Dirt series of rallying games. They don't mention Rally Cross Simlutor on their website, despite including a list of games they made in the eighties.
I remember it being difficult, but not to the point of frustration. I think it was challenging enough to be interesting - or not too easy to be boring. In some ways it was very different to modern racing games, but at the time I had little to compare it with, so it seemed quite normal.
Gameplay overview
Rally Cross Simulator is a top down racing game set over 5 tracks, each of which must be completed before proceeding to the next. Each race consists of three laps that must be completed in under two minutes. Other cars race with you but serve only as obstacles rather than opponents to beat. Your car has limited fuel, oil and water, which will reduce your performance if low (oil, water) or cause the game to end if expended (fuel).
Each track has a distinct visual style (race track, jungle, desert) and varying obstacles to overcome including a busy highway to cross, a railway that blocks the track, and miscellaneous oil spills, water patches and bollards that spin, slow or stop your car. The tracks also feature infrequent shortcuts and even a limited choice of routes on the last one.
Playing it now
Rally Cross Simulator is difficult. Very, very difficult. The version I'm playing has been cracked, but even with the time limit disabled (I admit, to my shame) it's still hard.
It's difficult for two main reasons. The first is that even the gentlest collision with the edge of the road causes your car to crash, whereupon it slowly resets to before the obstacle you hit, wasting precious seconds. After the first level the tracks become twisty and narrow, requiring precision manouvering.
The second reason is the controls. Most modern driving games employ the same controls - accelerate, brake, and steer. Rally Cross Simulator doesn't use this approach. Instead, you press the control for the direction on the screen that you want to go - up, down, left or right. This is particularly hard if you're playing using the keyboard, which I am.
It's a mental leap that my young self apparently had no difficulty mastering, but 24 years later I'm struggling. It's like driving on the other side of the road - most of the time everything's fine, but then suddenly my brain rebels against the irregularity and I find myself going in the wrong direction.
This also means that there's no brakes. If you're going too fast in one direction the only option is to go in another. Combined with the surprisingly good physics - cars have momentum, which effects cornering - crashes are frequent.
Unnoticed depth
To add to this difficulty your car carries barely enough fuel for a single lap, requiring pitstops, a feature I'd completely forgotten about. Oil and water also run out regardless of whether you're moving or not.
The shop allows you to purchase upgrades that will noticeably boost the performance of your car, but I haven't been able to afford any of them without resorting to cheating.
There's further nuance in how money is earned to spend in the shop, that I'm not sure I was aware of back in the eighties. You start each race with 600 points and lose some when hitting a minor obstacle such as an oil patch, puddle or gravel - but you gain points when colliding with other cars. This seems like a deliberate encouragement to ram the other racers, but there's little opportunity to do so. Most attempts at this end with me crashing.
Further difficulty comes in the form of sudden death, either by being hit full on by a train - which seems reasonable - or hitting a patch of oil, which does not. I'm not certain if this is intentional or a bug in the game, but it can be quite frustrating.
Wait, don't go
All of this probably sounds terrible, but the truth is that I absolutely love this game. The cars handle well. The graphics are clean and well drawn. The sound is sharp and detailed, even featuring a spoken "Go!" at the start of a race (a novelty at the time). The AI is both good and bad enough to be believable. It lets you continue from the last level when you lose. It even has a demo mode, where you can see how much better you need to be in order to beat it.
Best of all, because it's so difficult, there's a tremendous sense of satisfaction in completing a track. It has that 'just difficult enough' feeling that compels replayability.
You might be interested enough by this to try out Rally Cross Simulator for yourself, but you might be put off by the high difficulty. To which I would say, please persist. There's a good game under there.
(it's entirely likely that Rally Cross Simulator is far easier when played with a joystick, but I couldn't get mine to work with the emulator I'm using. I'll keep trying)