Most gamers have heard the story of Squaresoft in the mid-80s. They were struggling to make waves in the video game market, and most of their titles suffered from low sales. They created Final Fantasy as a last ditch effort, and it not only saved them but also established Squaresoft as one of the most high profile Japanese developers of all time. What you don’t often hear about are the games they released before their seminal role playing game. Rad Racer is one of these such titles. Noticing a lack of 3D perspective racing titles Squaresoft set to work on and released this game. It was not one of the most popular games, and it’s pretty obvious that they didn’t try to re-invent the wheel and instead used Sega’s hit arcade release OutRun as a jumping off point. Few regard it as a classic, but today I’m going to take a look and decide for myself.
There’s no story here. Heck, there’s barely a premise. You’re a nameless faceless driver who must drive across eight different courses from start to finish. The only time you even see your character out of the car is during the ending sequence. This is all beside the point; this is an old racing game and the scenario doesn’t really matter. What’s nice is that at the beginning of the game you can choose one of two different cars. You can drive either a red Ferrari, or an F1 style racer. They both have different handling characteristics. The Ferrari is better at taking turns, and the F1 car can reach higher top speeds. Needless to say the latter is only for veterans of this game. Taking a note from OutRun this game is not focused around beating other cars to the finish line. The roads are populated with pedestrian vehicles, but your only goal is to reach the end of each course before your timer runs out. Each stage features various checkpoints which increase this, and should you run out of precious seconds your car will begin slowing down. If you manage to cross the finish line or reach a checkpoint even after time has run out you can continue on.
While that’s a decent premise Rad Racer suffers from several issues. First of all each course features far too many turns. This wouldn’t be a problem, but the handling for both cars is extremely clunky. Your vehicle skids far too quickly, and the game forces you to rely on your brakes far too often. It’s extremely counter-intuitive for digital controls. Your turn radius is far too gradual, and you have to slow down on nearly every twist and bend. Drifting off of the road doesn’t lead to an automatic crash, but the right of way is full of scattered trees and signs that will cause your car to flip. When you’ve wrecked like this you lose precious seconds as the game slides your vehicle back on to the track, and both vehicles accelerate unrealistically slow. Both vehicles come equipped with turbo which you can activate by holding up on the directional pad, but it doesn’t kick in until you reach a specific speed. One of the worst aspects of this game is the fact that in the later levels colliding with another car will frequently cause you to wreck same as if you had ran into something on the side of the road. The hit detection for this is extremely awkward and over the top.
These elements make for an extremely tough game. You can’t afford to wreck more than a few times in the early stages, but later on you can’t even afford one major mistake. Another issue is that the levels are just plain boring. Rad Racer takes you to places like San Francisco, the Grand Canyon, and even Athens but the layouts are far too similar to one another. You get the occasional hill or straightaway, but the only thing that’s constant are the twists and turns in the road. The scenery just isn’t all that interesting. Outrun took a non-linear approach by giving you multiple paths to follow, but Rad Racer does the opposite by sticking you on a singular road. Occasionally the time of day transitions (only in specific stages) but that’s about it as far as diversity goes. Normally I would be more forgiving, but other similar titles handled this aspect far better.
On the plus side Rad Racer’s graphic engine is surprisingly capable. Most behind the car games from this time featured choppy scaling and bad animation, but that’s not the case here. This is one of the few areas in which Rad Racer surpasses the home console versions of Outrun. Unfortunately the graphics suffer from other issues. Most of the foreground scenery (aside from the road) is a single solid color, and this makes the game look very ugly. The backgrounds fare a little better, but they’re just static images. Some of them are very simple, but others like the San Francisco skyline at night look pretty nice. I also really liked all of the details in the Grand Canyon stage. Overall the graphics aren’t particularly good, but I imagine this was a sacrifice in order to make the game run so smoothly. The soundtrack is limited to just three songs. Thankfully you have complete control of which song you want to listen to as you play; you can cycle through them by pressing the down button. Each piece of music fits the action pretty well, but overall this is my least favorite Nobuo Uematsu soundtrack. It’s hard to imagine he went on to Final Fantasy after this.
It’s no wonder Square was a failing developer in the mid-80s; Rad Racer is simply not enjoyable. The developers were definitely competent in that they were able to make one of the few 3D racers that actually runs smoothly. Unfortunately the didn’t pay attention to what made the game they were inspired by so special. Rad Racer is a blemish on Squaresoft’s record, and is best left forgotten in time.
