I’d like to turn our attention to the Game Manual for a second, and ensure we're all following the instructions for taking care of our SUPER CDROMs.
Remember, if you take care of your Super CDROM friends, they will take care of you.
I’m really glad I didn’t read this manual at the start, because, although it might have helped a few things, it really does reveal a lot of things about the game that we had alot of fun discovering organically - like it has a map of all the locations (including the secret ones) on a map of the USA.
Likewise, there's 7 pages with pictures and stats of every single car available in the game. It totals 50 cars in all, which was notable, because my list of ones we found only goes up to 49… So there’s one car we’re missing…
Looking at the manual, it looks like some odd sort of almost hidden render, with a question mark for stats. Interesting. This is clearly some sort of secret car.
I wonder if you have to unlock it somehow? I have a few ideas, like buying every single car that I may try out later.
Otherwise the manual is what you’d expect. Basic information how to play the game and its various minigames etc. It does explain the different race types and has a little bit on techniques for racing and tuning, which could have been helpful to know.
It even has an ad for the first game!
But probably the most interesting part is the mention of the fact there's four player Multiplayer!
I was curious how the heck four player multiplayer could work in this game, so I booted it up to take a look.
On the menu screen we have three options:
Selecting ‘Vs Man’ gives a options menu to set up a multiplayer game.
The fact that it has 4 player support was really interesting. Given the time this was released, most console game had two players at best. It wasn't until the N64 till a console had four player support out of the box - most others needed some sort of multi-tap controller adapter. (which this apparently did).
For race types, you have a choice between Normal, Wet, Ice Cream and Medley - (which means ‘Random’ as far as I can tell)
Each player then has to choose their their car. They're listed by manufacturer and every one of the 49 official cars is selectable here. Again, glad I didn’t check this out first!
I do understand it was actually quite a bit thing that this game had licensed cars at the time, which probably helps explain why there’s 50 of them. In my attempted translations of various promotional media I found online, much of it took alot of pride in the licensed cars, and the first game boasted to be the first game to ever do it. I don’t know how true that is however.
I didn't get to drive one in the Story, so I decided to pick a Mitsubishi GTO. (3000GT)
When a player selects a car, they are then directed to the same parts install screen from the story mode, but it seems you have three of every modification except the nitro jet. This gives you the option to try and tune it to the type of race (wet, ice, dry etc) or just go big by putting the biggest turbos on it. It would be interesting doing this with the random track option and trying to make something that would be best for all three.
Once all four players have set up their cars, we get a specs overview and comparison.
I now understand why they put all that effort into those top down sprites. They’re used in this multiplayer mode!
Come to think of it, it's a quite clever way of getting four players working for this type of game.
I found the dry / wet / ice tracks are all extremely similar looking with a different colour backgrounds. However, the driving, shifting and techniques seem identical to the single player - and heavily reliant on the type of track and car parts selection.
And, since I'm a Nigel No-Friends, racing against no one, I won the trophy!
Though it really doesn’t mean much today, I love to see that they added this mode in. In another life, had I been japanese in the 1990's with friends or siblings with the same esoteric interests as weird as me, and somehow they were all familiar with this game and its controls, I could see a bit of fun trying to race different types of cars against one another. Hell, we ended up doing just that in Gran Turismo a few years later.
It does seem like a good excuse why the game has 50 cars, including all those kei cars and big four wheel drives and what have you - they’re a novelty to race in a mode like this.