Off-Road ChallengeOnly if you have money to burn. | |
Publisher: Midway Developer: Midway Genre: Racing Origin: U.S. It's called Off-Road Challenge and it's the latest game from Midway Home Entertainment. You probably didn't know it was out as Midway failed to mention this fact to just about everybody, but it is. Should you buy it? Is it really worth it? Good questions. Simple answer: no. Off-Road Challenge, like many Midway games, began its unhealthy life as a stale arcade game running on a carbon-copy of the Cruis'n USA engine. After mediocre success in the arcades, Midway handed the title over to Avalanche Software for the home conversion to Nintendo 64, where a bad game was made worse.
What is it? Oddly enough, a game called "Off-Road" Challenge never lets players really go off-roading. There are invisible borders engulfing all the roads in the game. Attempting to stray from the road is useless because it acts like a ramp, simply pushing the truck back to the main road. Like Cruis'n USA, there are a number of unique objects to crash/race through, from falling boulders to other trucks, trains, tires, carcasses, bumps, fences and what have you, but the novelty of it all wears off quickly. On the bright side, this game does come packaged with a two-player mode. Unfortunately, the mode sucks. Two player races enjoy a superbly executed framerate drop and work best one-on-one, as no computer-controlled players race. If they did, we fear the game may blow up. Graphics In terms of visuals, this game has it all: pop-up, dithering, blurry sprites, blurry polygons, ugly colors, limited textures and a super-smooth sense of speed complimented with more than 20 frames of animation per second. Midway and Avalanche have eliminated the use of fog with an excellent draw-in procedure that does little to deter hitching framerates.
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