Hard Drivin'

Hard Drivin'

released on Dec 31, 1989

Hard Drivin'

released on Dec 31, 1989

Hard Drivin' is a 3D arcade hit from Atari Games. You are in control of a high-performance sports car. Your objective is to race around the course as fast as possible and hit as many checkpoints as possible. If you hit a checkpoint you gain extra time to go farther. You will see traffic on the road both in your direction and coming down the opposite direction, so be careful when you pass... The course has two sections: speed track, and stunt track. Speed track is longer, but you can usually achieve higher speeds. Stunt track requires you to perform several stunts such as jumping bridges, driving through a loop, and so on. Crashing the car has no serious consequences and indeed shows a replay of your crash from a cinematic angle. Admire your crash head-on into the cement truck, or clipping the minivan, or flying off the bridge in the wrong angle... You lose several seconds as your car is "reset" and you get up to speed again. The home conversions retain most of the then-advanced 3D graphics but lack the force-feedback that was in the arcade version.


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A technical marvel for the time but aged worse than most games I've played. Hard to believe Daytona USA was only 5 years later.

Extremely ambitious for the Lynx. Sadly a sluggish slog albeit technically impressive.

It tries to replicate an early 3d arcade racer. This unfortunately means it runs about 4fps on the Atari Lynx. Too slow to really control it properly.

Give this one a pass.

A fair attempt at the arcade driving game. The problem lies with the fact that this was never a good game to begin with. The 3D graphics are great, as are the replays, but the FPS have been crippled for the home consoles. You can crawl around the track at a snail's pace, and yet there's simply no time to react to anything. There's just not enough enjoyment to be gleaned from this, once you've been around the track once or twice and completed the stunt course there's literally nothing else to do.

Pretty advanced stuff for 1988. This musta been the Gran Turismo of its day...

Weird shit that loops around from being novel at the time of release, to not novel at all upon console port, to novel again in the context of emulation. Buying a 5fps racer with a single track for $60-80 in the 90's is criminal behavior: No amount of marketing or tech hype justifies what a waste of money and space that is. But popping in a rom on the couch for 5-10 minutes? Harmless little tech demo.

It still amazes me how devs managed to do 3D on Genesis and SNES sometimes without additional processor chips. It's a shame that effort wasn't spent on a gameplay format as speed and screen-update-intensive as a racer.

This is the part where I plug a 16-bit 3-D game with minimal screen updates and good gameplay. This is the part where I plug True Golf Classics: Pebble Beach Golf Links. This is the part where you play True Golf Classics: Pebble Beach Golf Links.