A superb Formula One racing game from Sega that took sprite-scaled graphics to a whole new level. The game's single track offered a very reasonable representation of the famous Monaco Grand Prix circuit. Players could chose to race with one of three different skill/gear settings : Beginner : Automatic Gears Intermediate : 4-Speed Manual gears Professional : 7-Speed Manual Gears Before entering the Grand Prix, a qualification lap had to be completed. In the event of qualifying, the qualifying time determined the player's position on the starting grid. During the race itself, checkpoints had to be reached within a set time, or the race was over.
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What a difference 10 years makes. It's basically unrecognizable from the original Monaco GP. This time you're actually racing on the (mostly accurate) Monaco GP track, there's crowds, yachts in the marina, radio banter, and proper engine sounds just to name a few improvements. The game offers multiple sim difficulty levels and controls in general are great. There's a qualifying before the proper race as well. It's a very self-contained and short experience, but easily took the crown as the best racing sim when it came out.
"Let's try hard to win!"
It does resemble a true simulator in its simplicity, which for the time this was released for the genesis is absolutely bonkers. Too punishing for me, personally, but you do feel the weight and the fast turns and lightning quick acceleration that only cars like these are capable of.
It was a legend in the arcades. Its Master System port, not so much, unfortunately.
Kind of an oddball in the Genesis' pool of 1st party super-scaler racers, being more focused on the Original mode than the Arcade mode. The original cabinet for Super Monaco GP was a single looping track based on the real-life Monaco course. It was barren on content, but very visually rich in that small space it occupied. There was obviously no way to replicate that on console - both for technical and commercial reasons. You can't jam that many scaling objects onto an M68000, and even if you could, a single looping track is a quick holiday return in this business' eyes. So the game's very visually truncated by comparison. In exchange, however, there's a bonus 16-track grand prix, plus free-lap time trials for every course unlocked from the get go, making it arguably more content-rich than any other racer on the system.
But Super Monaco GP's campaign is hard as fuck man, we're talking downright violence. Hairpin turns define Monaco's game; take them too cautiously and lose multiple seconds off your lead. But take them too hard and risk losing even more time from spinning out - or just flat-out crashing and losing the run, permanently. Practice and memorization becomes key, a performance anxiety inducing twist that highly sets it apart from the 'A-to-B' driving in Outrun and Super Hang-On. Even with multiple days of attempts, I was scarcely getting better than 5th on each race. But I didn't take this insane difficulty as a discredit - it was an ass-knocking that made me respect it, like falling short of a tall mountain climb.
I spent the bulk of my time just in free run, learning the tracks casually and challenging my own times with a podcast in the background. Someday I'll return to this with more practice.
But Super Monaco GP's campaign is hard as fuck man, we're talking downright violence. Hairpin turns define Monaco's game; take them too cautiously and lose multiple seconds off your lead. But take them too hard and risk losing even more time from spinning out - or just flat-out crashing and losing the run, permanently. Practice and memorization becomes key, a performance anxiety inducing twist that highly sets it apart from the 'A-to-B' driving in Outrun and Super Hang-On. Even with multiple days of attempts, I was scarcely getting better than 5th on each race. But I didn't take this insane difficulty as a discredit - it was an ass-knocking that made me respect it, like falling short of a tall mountain climb.
I spent the bulk of my time just in free run, learning the tracks casually and challenging my own times with a podcast in the background. Someday I'll return to this with more practice.