Yes… it's time to introduce the third game in this completely unknown outside of Japan, but bizarrely wonderful series…

… Zero 4 Champ RR!





Gotta say, the cover on this one is probably the most uninteresting yet. I don't think I'd even recognize this one as a racing game if looking at a shelf of games. However, if you squint hard enough, you might just see some headlight or taillights of a 4th generation Supra.

But it's okay. We don't judge these games by their cover. (Even if that was how I discovered this series in the first place…)

You may ask, what does RR stand for? For which the answer is ‘I have no idea’.

I'm not even sure if the developers did. Any clever ideas?

...Maybe we'll find out as we play this game…

In the meantime, just try saying RR out loud real fast. It sounds like a barking dog.

Anyway, Zero 4Champ RR was released by the Media Rings Corporation in 1994, exactly a year after the second game. Boy, they could really shovel games out fast back then, huh?

This one however, has had the first change of platform for the series. It's no longer on the PCE Engine, but the Super Famicom, aka the Japanese version of the Super Nintendo, and a much less obscure console (at least here in the West).





This was probably a wise move in the long run, as today I can find a lot more online about this game than the PCE games. But, I'm definitely going to miss that CD soundtrack and all that extra content they could fit on a CD - the Super Famicom only had cartridges.

I also expect it will also have significantly less adult content… But, never say never. I had thought that about the second game too.

When starting up the game, we already start to the limitations of the cartridge based platform as the intro video, ( as shown at the end of the last video) is nowhere near as cool as the one in Zero4Champ II was.





However, it does have a sneak preview of how the races look - and it seems they've taken great advantage of the Super Nintendo sprite scaling capabilities and additional power. Races are back to the third person view point and look better than ever!





But, we know we're here for more than just races. Like the last two games, we've got a menu screen with the Story and VS modes, which includes multiplayer and vs CPU battles.





Next up, we'll start a new game!