A few days ago the Digital Foundry team did a retro look back at the Road Rash series. It's a fantastic retrospective covering each game, some of the tech used as well as modern day options for playing some of them as sadly Electronic Arts left the series to die over 20 years ago.

Revisiting this in 2023 and this is still a good game that does some pretty stand out things, some of which still aren't replicated today but were especially impressive back in 1991. You take part in illegal street races against 14 other riders per race. Each race you get prize money depending on how you finish which you can pool up to buy newer faster bikes in between races. Road Rash is one of the first games I ever played that I remember allowing me to grind money to get more powerful equipment as you can replay races for more prizes and better positions if you don't do so well initially.

Speed of bikes isn't the only way to win though as road Rash had this kind of biker gang / thug mentality. You can bang into other riders knocking them into cars, punch them, kick them or occasionally steal clubs to smack them off their bike to watch them tumble away in your wingmirrors in an impressive display of tech. They of course can also do this to you too. There is nothing more humiliating then being kicked off your bike by an edgy biker called Rude Boy. One of Road Rash's unique features I did like was that when you do crash or get punched off you can get up and run to your bike to get back on and carry on. Your bike has a hp bar so can only crash so much meaning you do have to be careful. You equally need to be careful when running for your bike as you can get run over amusingly.

It has some other neat little features like police bikes patrolling you need to get away from or knock off. If you crash next to them you are in trouble. I also really like in between the races you get little scenes of the other bikers talking about each other or you in a display of friendship or rivalry like you were chatting before the race. It's a nice touch.

Where the game does fall down though feels a little bit due to the limitation of the tech at the time. Though it is impressive how they used multiple layers to get the scrolling screen, the display of the wingmirrors and scenery but the game unfortunately runs terribly. Anywhere between 8-10 frames per second. I ended up downloading the improved mod which increases the performance to 13-15 frames per second which makes it feel smoother to control without feeling like the spirit of the original is totally lost. Equally there is just a lack of variety in the tracks. 4 out of 5 of them are simply solid green with different shades and trees but feel all too similar except the music. The only stand out track is Palm Desert entirely for being yellow instead. The icon's for each level though imply riding next to lakes, up mountains but in level that is sadly missing.

The game only has 5 tracks but does have 5 variations of each of them as you go up in difficulty. Each map extends each time from level 1 - 5 lengthening them out as well as putting more obstacles like cars, cows, road barriers and oil patches to artificially lengthen the game. I do appreciate the almost random number generator factor for that though as doing the same race twice you can't predict what will be where. As the courses all look green with straight windy roads it would be almost impossible to memorise them anyway though...

All in all it was fun to go back to this and I still like it. It's a rough first attempt, the levels are kind of bland and it runs poorly but the premise and thrill of weaving between cars beating thugs is still just mindless fun.

+ Still feels pretty unique.
+ Great premise.
+ I like the music.

- Runs terribly.
- Lack of variation in tracks.

(This is the 49th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

Ugh, an EA game, I bet it's filled with microtransactions. Oh, right, we're in 1991. This game is called Road Rash, and is a racing game with some fighting elements. There is a spiritual successor for it called Road Redemption, which released in 2017.

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 2/10

There actually is a set-up for this fictitious world in the manual. There once were two bitter rivals in Fang and Polygon. After Fang lost their final official race because Polygon tempered with Fang's bike beforehand, Fang challenged Polygon to an unofficial race, which started the cult behind 'Road Rash Races'. "Punching, kicking and clubbing and 150 miles per hour are the norm for Rashers".

In-game, you are greeted with messages by friends and foes before and sometimes after a race. Sometimes it's trash talk, sometimes it's a friendly hint and sometimes it's a police officer who tells you to not drive too fast, so he can catch you. After each level you beat, there is also a very short cutscene that plays where your character and, I presume, his girlfriend take their helmets off and enjoy the fresh air after winning all tracks in the previous level.

It's a bit more than the bare minimum, and I liked seeing those messages before races.

GAMEPLAY | 12/20

This got kind of addicting really quickly. Obviously I'm gonna move on as part of the challenge, but I'm sure I'll play this to chill out from time to time like I used to do for F-Zero.

You start with the standard bike and have 5 races available at the beginning. Your goal is to win each race against 15 or so competitors, which allows you to move up in levels and difficulty, until you reach the final race. After each race, you are compensated in $ based on your finish and can use it to upgrade to bikes that are faster and can be controlled better. Most of the time, progress is blocked because your bike simply won't be fast enough to win, so you'll need to farm money in races you know you'll lose to be able to afford a better bike. I can't say how much of a grind it is at later levels, but it was acceptable where I stopped, which was after I finished the second level.

The special feature of Road Rash is that during races, you can ram the bike of the other racers, punch/kick them and hit them with melee weapons. You have a meter for your bike and your character health. If your character health goes down to 0, you fall off your bike but it recovers over time. There are also cars on the road that drive in both directions, which you have to avoid. If you are hit, you usually fly far away from your bike and have to run all the way back to it to get back to driving, which takes a while. Cars can hit your bike after you already crashed and kick it even further away that way, which is a funny mechanic, but might get frustrating later down the line because after two crashes, you're pretty much not going to win. I didn't find any way to back out of a race other than a reset of the emulator. Finally, there is a police bike that drives around sometimes as well, and if you fall off your bike near the officer, he will bust you and fine you money.

I really like the idea of this, and it's recently gotten a spiritual successor in Road Redemption (2017), but at least for the first two levels, I never really saw much incentive to battle the bikers. You either don't catch up to the fastest bikes or you can blaze past them once you do, so there isn't a lot of time for when you could be in a confrontation with them. Plus, I never got a melee weapon up to this point and I'm not even sure how to attain one, so that was disappointing.

The racing was fun regardless. It's very simple, you have to try to stay on track in a vertically scrolling 2D track, avoid the cars and get past the other racers. Your bikes differ in speed and handling, though that is not indicated everywhere but in the description of the bikes as far as I could tell.

Road Rash got two sequels over the next years, which were both praised for the same fun factor that you got with the first, but also criticized for lack of innovation. For those reasons, I'm not going to try those, but Road Rash goes 3D in 1998, has a PlayStation release in 2000 and then one final release in 2009 on the EA Mobile site only (hello, modern EA) before it then started to sit dormant ever since.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 6/10

No voice acting. The sound design in this is actually not so good. There aren't many sound effects here to begin with, including when your opponents crash into cars or the sound of the engine of any car in general. The main sound you will hear is the tires screeching when you turn corners, and that sound doesn't even sound like how it sounds in reality or even close to it.

As far the OST, I think overall it's a plus. If you played this when you were younger and played these maps over and over again, it's a soundtrack that feels distinct enough to stick around with you for a while. The track I liked the most is probably the Pacific Coast one. All tracks have this element to them I can't really describe well, but if I had to make an attempt, I'd describe it as a low pitch bouncey sound, which definitely is a terrible description. But nevertheless, my point is that it didn't quite gell with me and it being the connecting theme in the OST, I can't say this would be among the great soundtracks of this year if I were to make a list. Unlike a game like F-Zero, the OST didn't have any really good tracks that I would gladly listen to outside of the game either.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 7/10

The game doesn't look bad, it doesn't look fantastic. You drive down a road that looks the same throughout for each map with forests and mountains visible in the horizon. You and your opponents look the same and are only distinguished by color. What I really like about the graphical presentation is the animations. The animations of the crash and how your bike and you fly into the air and down on your butt and how you rush back to your bike is pretty funnily presented here. In terms of graphical fidelity, your main issue here might be that you will have a hard time sometimes figuring out that you're approaching a car, as the low resolution from time to time makes them hard to see quickly enough.

ATMOSPHERE | 6/10

In terms of atmosphere, it hits best when you drive behind a group of bikers and see them drive into the trunk of the car in front of them and fly off their bikes as you leave them in the dust. Or when you are side-by-side with another biker and throw a punch or hit their bike with yours to drive them off course. That doesn't happen often enough though I thought.

CONTENT | 6/10

There are 5 levels with 5 races each and 8 total bikes you can unlock. It's a solid amount of content, nothing special here.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 7/10

Pretty basic but clean design here. You go through more and more difficult levels and continue to earn money to unlock faster and faster bikes. Effective, and I'd say you'll have a fun 10-15 hours or so trying to win all races.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10

I like the concept of using illegal tactics during a race to gain an advantage. I just don't feel like it's fleshed out here and you rarely have a need to use these tactics. It would have also been more fun if we could have gone into a race having some sort of melee weapon pre selected, because I went through two levels without getting my hands on a single one.

REPLAYABILITY | 3/5

It's a racing game, so you'll have plenty of motivation to keep playing and trying to beat your previous high scores.

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

The game worked well at all times.

OVERALL | 60/100

It's an enjoyable racing game. If you're looking for a more modern experience though, I'd suggest checking out Road Redemption. Road Rash's main selling proposition, the fighting during the racing, is only a small part of the gameplay here and it quickly just turns into a normal racing game for the most part.

One of my father's favorite games. One time while he was playing it (and for what it's worth I dont remember if this story was in Road Rash 1 or 2, they're really similar and fwiw I like 2 better) the game broke in a one in a million way. See, the trick about Road Rash is that you can punch other bikers and knock them off their bikes. Some of them have weapons, and if you time it right, you can take the weapon. Some courses have hazards like oncoming traffic or cows in the street. Well, we'd all swear to this series of events: he was closing in on first place, and the first place biker started his swing animation, and when it finished there was a cow in place of the weapon, and my father hit this cow at 170MPH and went soaring for miles, having to run back to his bike and endure the defeat at the hands of the Cow Wielding Man.

This seemed like one of those games everybody had. That's fine by me cause it's a good one. I'm not a big racer guy but I always dug this franchise. I liked the simple fight mechanics, I always thought that it added something that simple racers needed. I liked grinding for the best bikes to give me that extra edge, you pretty much needed to pretty quickly. RR1 also has a killer soundtrack to race too. I see people complaining about the 10 fps but honestly doesn't feel that bad actually playing it and it is an early genesis game. Watching it, it looks bad but it plays fine.

Played on August 26th, 2023 (SEGA Genesis Challenge 37/160)

Note: This game is currently put on "shelved" because I haven't cleared the game completely, but I've come to grips on the mechanics to give an assessment of the game.

You ever get sick of all of those racers knocking you off of your bikes in motorcycle racing games? Well, I certainly have. Then this game might just be up to your speed because you're the one knocking off all those racers that's getting in your way. And I had a real blast with the game as the controls felt very good and knocking down nearby racers felt satisfying. Too bad you have to show restraint for a select few lest you want to scolded before the race begins.

Being a game where you can just punch, kick, and sometimes even club your opponents, the game's premise is an illegal racer and thus you will have to deal with not just your opponents, but dealing with traffic and even the police. You can still get knocked off which might not be so much of a big deal as long as it only happens once or twice, but it can still halt your progress immensely. But if it so happens that you are knocked off in front of a police bike, you get fined and the race ends for you. Same thing applies to your bike getting totaled, but that scenario is so rare that I haven't had that happen to me yet. The best of course of action to survive ongoing traffic is the simple rule of driving to always stay in your lane unless you are making a pass.

The music is great and the visuals are nice, but there are only five courses in the game and when you complete them all, you do them again, but the difference is that the course is longer, the racers are faster, and there are supposedly much more brutal traffic. You can remedy this by buying new bikes after a race, and on top of that, you can actually spam a course even after you've cleared it in order to farm money or just simply try as many times as you want to get that first place. I'm not sure how many waves there are, but apparently a longplay took 3 hours of the game and as fun as the game is, I doubt it's something I want to spend that much time all at once on.

(Genesis - Emulated) an average game that gets half an extra for its little charm and personallity, other than that, its a okay racing game with difficulty based on what vehicle you buy, making you actually have to grind at the end if you want to have any chance, but even so, the obstacles and cars that randomly interrupt your progress will make sure you still don't have a chance, but the charm of its little details prevent me from totally disliking it, how each rasher is named, have portraits and a little bit of personallity, natasha for example never fights you if you don't hit first, viper is always last (poor girl) you can bounce on cars, its rare to happen but it does happen.
i played it on a RG280V, aside from the very hard buttons and some finger cramp from turning too hard and the position of your hand, it was a excelent experience, the emulation provided was flawless, but this is a review of the game, not the system i played on.

O único defeito é ser muito curto de resto

Divertido DEMAIS nada melhor que meter paulada em motoqueiro

E o jogo é bem bonito pra época ein

As músicas tbm são hype

for a game that runs at ~10 fps, this is a remarkably good pseudo-3d racer on genesis. there's a good weight to the bike and it handles very comfortably even without analog controls, giving the gameplay a richness that most forward-scrolling console titles from this area never achieved. the courses mainly consist of moving forward with occasional zig zags, sharp turns, and intersections to contend with, as well as cars and the occasional police bike. as you jockey for position with your rival bikers, you have the option to other simply cut in front of them or actually fight them with some basic attacks off the side of your bike. the AI never really fights back, undercutting the mechanic, but it feels so good to knock an opponent in front of an on-coming car and watch them fly off. other than these additions it's just pure racing. flying off of hills and drifting around corners is the bread and butter of this game.

in fact, the above describes basically every facet of the game with next to no variation. while there are five tracks, as far as I can tell they are only aesthetic variations. the course layouts might as well be randomized given how few obstacles there are, and I only noticed a few course-unique features such as slippery sand patches in the desert level. these or the construction signs didn't seem to actually affect gameplay much to my surprise, and I'm not sure if this was an oversight or just generosity on the part of the developers. after clearing all five tracks, you move onto a new "level" where you race each of the tracks again on a slightly harder difficulty level. I probably played about 15 races and each one felt virtually identical. by the time I got to the third level I was ready to call it quits from sheer tedium. perhaps there's content I missed, but if so, they should have stuck some more of it near the beginning.

what is a solid feature is the game structure around the races. between each race you gain winnings based on your placement, which can be cashed in for a different bike from a solid selection. there's no penalty for failing a race (ie placing outside of the top spots) and it seems you can replay them to your heart's content in order to advance. it would have been very easy for them to simply make this a typical arcade experience that boots you back to the start menu on a loss, but it seems like EA took the higher route here and made sure to give players some achievable accomplishments with no arbitrary restrictions.

my mindset on this game is that I probably would have adored it if I was a genesis fan in the early 90s, and the package here would have kept me occupied for quite a long time. given that I grew up a decade after that fact, it's hard to ignore the lack of substance here. however, the action itself is easy to pick up and extremely tightly designed, and the 3D effects on genesis are rather impressive. for its time, I can absolutely understand why many loved this series.

This was the game that introduced me to the concept of grinding; I remember replaying Sierra Nevada on level 1 for hours so that I could immediately afford the Diablo (most expensive bike). Then I promptly crashed out and got a game over for going broke. I don't think my controller survived.

Anyway, the idea behind the game is fantastic; an illegal, no holds barred cross-country bike race which blends racing and fighting. The racing component is surprisingly tight for most of the game. This is actually one of the games where I did a lot better now than back then even though my reflexes have gone to crap; because I actually know how to drive now. I gravitate towards the right lane, I look ahead, I know how to use the brake, and I look out for the road signs. Incidentally, the road signs are a great idea as the road undulates and you often don't have a clear view of what's ahead of you, so the signs will save your skin a lot.

Notice I said "most of the game" above. This is because the fifth level has one of the most ridiculous difficulties in video games. The road snakes and whips around so fast, often without signs. Even if there is a sign and you start turning as soon as you see it, you will end up going off road and crashing. On top of the ridiculously tight turns, there is a lot of traffic on the road, and it's generated specifically to spite you. If there is a car in the right lane and you move to overtake it, you can be absolutely sure that a car will spawn moving the other direction to take you out. I went from breezing through the races in the first four levels to having to literally save state every mile or so, and needing to redo some of those saves like ten times because the game was demanding Cuphead levels of precision.

The fighting is a great idea because it's an effective hook for people who don't generally like racing games like myself. It's not terribly deep, but that's ok - it's still fun and satisfying, and I'm not looking for Street Fighter 2 anyway. However, the game's mechanics and rules actually push the player to play it more like a pure racer, mostly due to the rubberbanding.

The rubberbanding is understandable given the hardware limitations, and actually seems nice; no matter how slow or fast you are, you will always be near another racer which gives you a lot of opportunities for combat. However, while it ensures a lot of combat, it also makes the combat quite inconsequential; knocking another racer off their bike barely seems to make any kind of dent in their race time thanks to the rubberbanding. Thus, the advice that Elvis-lookalike Ikira gives you inbetween races is probably the most useful advice for getting good: "be fast, and let the others fight among themselves." I wish there were something that rewarded you for being good at fighting - perhaps being able to remove opponents from the race if you wiped them out enough, or knocked them down in front of a cop. A reward money bonus for knocking people off their bikes maybe? As it is, the combat is fun, but feels more like an afterthought, and what I was left with was a moderately fun racing game with a nearly impossible final level.