With our mastery over the CRX, Grass is now pointing us to race progressively bigger cars…
Mitsubishi Galant, Bluebirds, Diamantes, Nissan Bluebirds, Skylines, Mazda RX7s… and more

I won't bore you with all the painstaking details with these cars (well, not just yet ), but I'm astonished with the variety on display here. Cars I know as boring family cruisers like the Bluebird or the Diamante I wouldn’t expect to see in a racing game, though they did likely have Japan only performance variants - like just about every Japanese car of this era thanks to their crazy economy.

I don't think I saw so many unique cars featured in a game until Gran Turismo, many years later. Here’s just a sample of a few I’ve run into:





… of course, it probably helps when these seem to be endless variants of the same three drawings...

You know what? I was originally going to riff on the fact that all these sprites look the exact same as one another, but with some slightly modified taillights, or in some cases, literally the name of the car written in what little pixels were available, usually backwards… but once I put them all together like this next to photos of what they’re based off… I actually see it.

I don’t know much about the PC Engine / TurboGraphx-16, but I expect maybe it had memory limitations and they had to get clever with their use of sprites. It first came out in 1987, after all.

So with all that in mind, I think they actually did a pretty decent job of capturing these cars likeness given they probably had crazy technical limitations, particularly to both keep all these cars in the game, as well as the animated speaking characters, portraits and ensuring there's enough room left over for XXXX!

I mean, look at how tiny this thing was, both console and cartridges!





All these damn cars though... and no driveable MR2s.

There better be one to buy in this damn game, after all, one is on on the cover. What is this, false advertising?