Oh, man! This game is VERY nostalgic to me. It may not be an amazing game or anything, but it was one of my most played co-op games when I was a kid. Me and my older brother would play until our eyes pop out. This game just made us laugh all the time and, at the time, it was all that mattered to me.
Since you were asking about how to access the unused CITY3.LEV course...I FOUND A WAY. (And it doesn't even involve any wacky hex editor hijinks or anything of that sort.) HOW TO DRIVE ON THE UNUSED CITY3.LEV COURSE Step 1: Create a "city3" sound folder by copying one of the other sound folders (I used the "city1" folder). (I don't know if you actually need to do this, but I did it just in case.) Step 2: Start up the game by typing the following at the DOS prompt: racing -rec -lev city3 -cfg [configfile] ...where [configfile] is the filename (without extension) of the configuration file you're using. (Technically, the "-cfg [configfile]" part is optional, but you'll need it if you don't want to get stuck with the default settings.) Step 3: In this menu, there is a column of six white squares to the left; click them to change them to the game's "normal" color options (red, blue, yellow, green, orange, purple). (If I'm not mistaken, they indicate the NPC driver color settings; don't leave them white because that's (partially) what's causing the issues with loading the course in the first place.) Step 4: Click the "OK, LET'S RECORD!" button. This will put you into a race...or at least some kind of race-like situation. The NPC drivers will be glitched out, but at least you'll be able to drive around and stuff. By the way, I'm sure this isn't the only way to access this course; I've heard of ways to make it selectable in the game menu system, but that stuff involves a hex editor, and I don't need no stinkin' hex editor. :p Here's a video of me flying around the CITY3.LEV course in a helicopter (which I had to use the -car command line option to be able to use): ua-cam.com/video/zgqpFZ89vL0/v-deo.html
For games that for the 'fun and exploration first, racing second' school of design, look no further than the Carmageddon series. You don't even have to race on the tracks to complete the races, and exploration is the entire ethos, with secrets and powerups scattered all around. A huge variety of tracks and cars, too. It's pretty violent, and a little immature at times, but the freedom you have when playing is just superb!
I think I'm a little late, but another game, which seems like the developers forgot about racing halfway through making it, is Sonic R. The levels are not as unnecessarily big as in BRR, but it looks like the game is more about collecting hidden coins and chaos emeralds than racing. At least that's the impression I've got from Nerd3 video.
EDIT: For anyone interested, a fixed cycles setting of 200,000 seems to be a decent balance between smooth graphics and not too much jittery camera movement. When I was a kid, I always wondered why they had one smiley face with a weird red arrow on it. I was today years old when I realized it was a reference to Watchmen. I can't remember if I had much trouble beating the AI opponents in this game. Most of what I remember is that I favored tracks that allowed me to drive all over the place without worrying about getting stuck. Ones where you could safely break out of the assigned route and just drive across endless miles of flat terrain. I think one of the tracks where your vehicle choices were either a Jeep or ATV even had some kind of weird mountain hidden out in the depths of the unused map, and I used to love flying off of it at ridiculous speed. The music playing during the clip at 10:56 reminds me an awful lot of the main theme of the movie The Running Man. Great job as always, Ross-... Uh, I mean Kris!
Fantastic video. You make half an hour pass like it's 5 minutes. Love seeing neat little secrets and details like seen in BRR, it just tells me the devs truly cared. This sort of attention to detail is why I can't get into a lot of modern games, because they just feel like stale clean products rather than video games with character. Carmageddon is one of the best in this aspect, cause you can spend like 3 times more playing the outside content rather than just doing the wreck racing.
I was obsessed with this game when I was a kid. And when you get bored you could go off the track and seemingly cruise around a limitless planet. I don't remember the shaky camera it was silky smooth
19:20 Your voice matches up perfectly with the drum beats in the music, and it sounds like you're rapping, making it really jarring when I noticed this and you didn't rhyme afterwards. I half expected: There's also a replay feature, and this is really fun. You can record a replay of any race you've done.
While not available on computers, a good exploration/racing experience is Road Trip Adventure on the PS2. Always loved the idea of being able to take a casual drive in a racing game and explore easter eggs dotted around the map.
It's cool to see you review one of my childhood games, which also got me into the racing genre. There's one fun fact about the BRR's AI, mainly how it really isn't an AI. You see, the AI drivers are actually a recording of 6 players driving in multiplayer. In single player, the recording is played back, with the player taking role of one of the drivers in recording. Rubberbanding happens by the game speeding up the recording when the player is in the lead. You can notice this by playing the same track with same character and color. The "AI" drivers always finish the race in same order. Another way to notice this is by doing a head-on collision. Doing this with "AI" driver ends up with the player's vehicle flying. But the head-on collision between two human players leads to both of their vehicles being pushed into opposite directions. Thus, the game is most fun in 6 player multiplayer, though finding people to play this old game would be difficult. Which is a shame, as this game would have been one of my favorite DOS racing games, if it had a proper AI who can do nasty tricks like sideswiping while at the same time be vulnerable to making mistakes, like in Fatal Racing (or Whiplash, as it was known in the US).
Another fun fact about the game is that it was supposed to have a expansive backstory and description on every vehicle in the game. Keith Stuart, the man wrote all of the lore, wrote an article in Eurogamer about the video game lore in general. In the article, he revealed that the game was about this "Intergalactic Racing League" and that the vehicles were supposed to feature reviews from fictitious magazines such as "Mud Buggy Enthusiast". All of this stuff was supposed to be included in the game's manual, which was then scrapped because Domark (The publisher) thought the manual's printing costs were too high for a simple racing game as this. And so, Stuart ends up throwing all of it away instead of, you know, dump the lore into a .TXT or .DOC file and put it into the CD along with the game. At least that way the folks interested about the lore wouldn't be bummed by the lack of it. BTW, this is one of those games, which Source Code I would LOVE to see released nowadays.
I would love a spiritual successor to the Monster Truck Madness games. I loved when I found a soccer field in one of the early games and you could play with a soccer ball. I miss games like that.
I think LGR said he played Duke Nukem 3D in the tiny window at reduced frame rate when his computers weren't powerful enough to run it full screen. I can't tell what would be worse, a racing game or an FPS at a 1x1.5 inch screen.
Graphics and controls were a bit clunky but this game was AWESOME fun multiplayer, either against my brother in split screen or between Doom/RTS games when my mates came round for a LAN weekend. Definitely a bit of a cult classic
Really nice video. Thanks. Good analysis. I love it. This game was "the rare game" out of the line. Very complete game for this ages.Thats why you remember it a lot. Under my opinion it will be difficult to make another new big red racing ... nowadays everything has changed a lot and the youth have another point of view for gaming, they dont pay attention to details like that in videogames....
One of my favourite games way back when! Sure, the stereotype one-liners are appalling and I never really noticed the shaking camera. But the gameplay, the different tracks, vehicles, weird sound bites ("Put your pedal to the metal!") and music... so unique, so awesome.
It is kind of weird. The designs of the vehicles (especially the jeeps with the decals on the hood) seem so familiar to me; but I have no recollection of the rest of this game. I can't tell if that's because i've just forgotten a lot about this game, or if the assets were used in some other game that I've played.
About the music I kind of feel it added to the whole atmosphere of the game which was quite surreal for a racing game. Edit: also nice to see I was not the only one who went exploring instead of just racing. Also I am pretty sure I might still have the "original" copy which was Kixx budget version by Eidos. .
Aah, I remember loving this game back in the day but I could never remember this super generic name. Great video and thanks for bringing this gem back into my mind!
Great video! I LOVED this game (that "WhooHoo" when you respawn brings it all back)! I seem to remember reading in PC Format in the UK, who only reviewed retail games, that the bad reviews were mainly based off the review release. The retail release was held back for a few months for tweaking and bug fixes as a result. Happy days.
Pixelmusement Oh yeah, wasn't suggesting that. Just sharing some trivia that popped back into my head after 20+ years (doesn't seem that long!)... that some of the bad early magazine reviews were based on a non-retail release that wasn't as fun to play.
Pity you missed an easter egg by disabling commentary: namely WHO the commentators were. Jon St. John, normally the voice of Duke Nukem, really went all out, as did the Duke3D VO director, Lani Minella. ...At least I read the credits after playing the Demo. :P
+John F. Donnelly There is indeed a credits roll in the game, but it's fairly slow and watching the racing in the background just makes me want to play the game instead. ;)
Big Red Racing was one of the first warez titles I downloaded. Loved the game and multiplayer, when working properly, is fun. I posted that before i saw the end of the video!
The Camera shake is definitely a symptom of running the game on a machine much faster then intended. It never did this on my old system because running at too high of a framerate was the last of our problems with computers of the day.
An interesting angle on the game dungeon format. I'd love to see the 'show don't tell' principle shown more love though. Those stereotypical comments - I'd love to hear them, not just listen to your impressions of them (not that I wouldn't want to hear your impressions).
I agree, there needs to be a new Big Red Racing successor! There hasn't been one for over 20 years and no indie developer has even attempted to make one! Come on, guys! Let's give this game another shot! Also, I like this review style, but I still think you should provide the specs for getting it to run in DOSBox, as that is part of why I watch your reviews. Though hearing I can run this in SVGA by pressing the plus key, is already big news for me.
+Cyberbrickmaster1986 I mention in the video to just set a fixed cycles count in DOSBox. You'll need to tweak it a bit to find what's comfortable for you in terms of framerate vs. shakiness. :B
I didn't know what fixed cycle to set it to. But I've already got it set to 20,000 cycles and it works fine in VGA mode. Haven't tested it in SVGA, as I didn't know you could get SVGA in the game. As for what I think about the game itself, well.. despite being made in 1996, the graphics weren't very good for the time, but it did have a lot of content and it was all quite fun to play with some pretty good attention to detail with the use of open world maps, even if they were just a cosmetic part of the game. Also, I can kind of put up with some of the announcers, even if some of the stereotypes weren't very accurate. The Australian one keeps mentioning about a Kiwi Bird, even though those things are only found in New Zealand and are a protected endangered species. Also, I feel like they could've done more with counting down in the courses native languages, as they did it for only some countries, but not the ones in Asia or Africa for some reason. Even though they used a foreign language for Ireland, despite the number of Irish that can speak English.
Also, while injection may technically be better than canisters because of the granularity, canisters are definitely better once you learn the tracks and know when to use the boosts, since the total amount of boost is much higher for canisters. (a full injection tank is only worth about 3 canisters or so IIRC)
+Max Injection still has one MASSIVE advantage over canisters though in that you can pulse it for just a second after resetting or right from the starting line to immediately get yourself up to full speed! :o
You need to set a fixed cycles count which reduces the framerate to more precisely match the render rate. I actually forget what I had set it to while recording footage for this video since the shakey-cam doesn't actually bother me all that much, but DOSBox allows you to set the cycleup and cycledown increments so if you start with something like 50,000, set the up and down rates to 10,000 per press, then go into the game and pump the resolution up to maximum, you can then use CTRL+F11 and CTRL+F12 to fine-tune the cycles until the framerate and camera shakiness is around where you want it! :B
+tsoliman I've heard both from various people in my life so I don't honestly know which is right or if both are right, so I just say it however I feel like saying it. :P
Native speaker - "DEE-cals" is how I've always pronounced it. (Likely learned from an employee at a model train/model car/model airplane store as a kid.)
@Pixelmusement @7:00 About the camera juddering. Believe me - the developers noticed it. But it was almost certainly a necessary RUN-time optimisation for the game to be able to run as fast as it did on consumer machines of the day. That is why the pre-rendered clips showed no such issue - they were not rendered in real time, as the optimisation was turned OFF to get a higher quality render. It probably took at least a second to render each frame for the intro - not quick enough to play, but yes, very smooth looking with the frames put together and run, after the fact, at 30-60 FPS! @7:44 You won't be able to fix it; such setups will be hardcoded constants and/or bitshifting offsets set in the source code for the release build, and will have been set such due to fixed minimum hardware limitations at the time. There would have been a separate developer build for judderless camera; without the source code, there is no getting that back. The shaking has nothing to do with the physics vs refresh rate. It has to do with large rotational increments. This was probably some sort of camera / view matrix optimisation, e.g. fitting each matrix element into 5 or 6 bits so as to fit extra working data into the registers, so as to use CPU cache line and register space as efficiently as possible to do very fast camera calculations. This means the precision would have been very low, causing the coarseness of rotation and thus the juddering you see. One way to look at this is to say 2^6 bits = 64 different values or only about 20 steps around the entire unit circle, thus increments of more than 5 degrees rotation would be the minimum step! Modern GPUs do this easily because they can process an entire 4x4 matrix in parallel, with each element being a full 32-bit width floating point value. Without this, it probably would not have been possible to ship a game running in real time speeds _at all_. Think about that before complaining too much - and yes, my mates and I also hated the shuddering camera, but we still loved the game.
I mean, it's not impossible that it's an optimization thing, but given that the jitter goes away if the framerate is low enough and given that if you analyze the individual frames you can see the interpolation seemingly working backwards I'm pretty convinced this is a bug, not an optimizing shortcoming. Ultimately, unless someone unearths the original source code we may never know for certain. :P
Awesome game, I played the heck out of it as a child myself. I remember loving the first person view, awkward though it may be, because I found it so immersive. Also, it seems the game devs were flatlanders XD
Great video :) Am I the only one the only one thinking Terminal Velocity? The way the 3d renders looks so much like that. If it's from the same company it might have taunts you can activate with the number keys.
+Sean Lavoie Terminal Velocity was done by an entirely different company and the engines definitely render very differently from each other. Granted, I do get where you're coming from with that notion, but no, they're not related at all. :B
Too bad you didnt get to experience this games multiplayer with a friend :( Thats where it shined the most. Maybe next time try to collab with some other retro YTubers? My best friend and I spend over two weeks playing this game alone just after he got his first PC. Sure, there were Need for Speed, Hi-Octane, Fatal Racing, Destruction Derby and Screamer at the start of 1996, but none of them offered Split Screen! Btw I cant remember SVGA mode nor camera shaking, maybe Pentium 133 was just too slow.
Three things: #1: You can actually set the vision/texture distances a bit further than 22; I've been able to make the game work fairly well with them both set to 25, which looks like THIS: ua-cam.com/video/iWS_WNf9N08/v-deo.html In that video, you should be able to see just a bit further than you normally would be able to. (I haven't thoroughly tested this in SVGA mode, but it seems stable in VGA mode, at least.) #2: The demo video (0:10 to 1:01 and 7:17 to 7:45 in your video) looks like it was made with a beta version of the game or something; there are different color palettes all over the place, and it looks like that version's Japan course had weird hexagonal-looking trees instead of the ones in the final. #3: The game doesn't have any actual AI; the opponent drivers are pre-recorded from developer gameplay, similar to the game's built-in replay feature. (The game makes them "rubber-band" by adjusting the playback speed of these recordings.)
+ToiletDuck64 The lowest vision distance I tested above 22 was 26 and that still crashed things, so I figured because there was so little space between 22 and 26, recommending anything higher than 22 wouldn't be a good idea because there's no way I could thoroughly test it. That's also really interesting info about how the "AI" works and actually explains a lot. :o
The camera shakyness never bothered me much tbh. I never even noticed it when I played the demo back in 96. BRR is fun as hell. I've even played it online thru DOSBox's IPX emulation some time ago.
+Negrostrike The camera shaking never bothered me that much either, until I tried to watch the footage I was recording and realized, "OK, if you're not actually focussing on the race, this is really hard to watch..."
This game came with my Epson Stylus 600 in around 1998. Incredibly fun to play! Oh, and the telephone box looked very British so I looked up the developers, who were based in London. I remember the publishers, Domark, publishing a lot of the arcade conversions on the ZX Spectrum. www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekpub.cgi?regexp=^Domark+Ltd$&loadpics=1
I also don't remember as a kid the camera being so shaky. It's strange how it behaves normal during the track preview and when you hit the 1st person view key. As the camera slowly pans into the 1st person view the jitters subside for a few seconds. It seems like it was a oversight or bug during the programing of the game? I wonder how many versions of this game exist and if all versions use this issue with the camera. My first thought was also that it was an emulation issue. Perhaps tied to the way mouse input is handled? But disabling the mouse and trying it within real hardware and on Msdos showed no improvement. It's a shame the source code has never been released. It be a real thrill to make custom maps for this.
The closest game I know to this, although its more grounded in reality, was the off road racing game 1nsane that came out around 2000 but it did have some wacky vehicles alongside all sorts of off road vehicles.
13:36 "Transparent" has the opposite meaning for non-programmers: * "easily seen through, recognized, or detected" * "manifest; obvious" (www.dictionary.com/browse/transparent) "Transparent" in computer science (and related contexts) means the user won't notice it. * www.webopedia.com/definitions/transparent/ * www.techopedia.com/definition/3400/network-transparency
There's one secret you missed mentioning, and it's probably the best one out of the lot. You can get any vehicle on any track. I do have memories of changing file names (COPTER.VHC to JEEP.VHC for example) to do it when I was young, but that doesn't seem to work on the version I downloaded to test. It ends up in an endless loading loop trying to get into the race, so I'm guessing it was patched out (Like the Excelsior Phase One name bug). You can still do it though with a command line, though. Add ' -car (vehicle 1) -car (vehicle 2)' to the command to run the game using those vehicles. I have fond memories of flying around with the Heli and just exploring all the maps.
+Shade Millith I would've mentioned it if there were secret vehicles to drive. Might be possible to fly the UFO which replaces the helicopters for the flyby previews on the interplanetary courses, but the file which contains all the data for the UFO is very small, suggesting it might be lacking some of the data necessary for that.
I didn't mean secret vehicles, just a secret to use any vehicle on any map. Really useful for exploring. And the UFO is actually usable. It's like a much less floaty, but slower helicopter. ua-cam.com/video/RDQqIktQyDg/v-deo.html
Man, the one I manage to guess correctly does not have the mention at the end! I am going back to my nostalgic depression! Very nice video though, with a very fun game I only played as a demo back in the 90`s, that had only 2 tracks. Kris, I just thought that some information you put in your videos (if game is commercial, DOSbox cycles, etc.) could make way after credits or at least in the youtube comments.
+Gerson Silva I thought about adding in the Patreon/Guess stuff, but I wanted to maintain the format as closely as possible to Ross's. I can put a mention for the correct guess in the next episode. ;)
Except when that craving can't be filled. I really want another game like Moraff's World with all its no plot and such shenanigans, but it just doesn't exist.
Interesting. Had to look it up. Never hear of the game, but something bothered me as soon as I read that. and I just placed it. I saw "Moraff's World", but I heard in my head, "Welcome to Morlach's famous shop" , from Mass Effect 1. Also the game sounds really intriguing. A bit of rogue-like crossed with epic adventure. Maybe an early attempt at a 100% proceduraly generated epic RPG. Sort of the holy grail of RPGs, right? A game you can play through 1000 times and every time completely different. At least that's what I get from it.
I actually remember playing the game that Kris uses as an example of a first-person Breakout clone, but I can't remember the name. It was one of many games played during my own digs into those "thousand games" CDs of my youth.
I played the demo of BRR a ton when I was a kid, good to see that the framerate is actually ass and it wasn't just my 486/66 :D Great vid, glad to see you love Ross's Game Dungeon too!
+IllidanS4 I don't think it was on store shelves long. I was never able to find a legit copy as a kid back when it was SUPPOSED to be for sale and I never found used copies either at game stores back then. :/
+Jispy Moe Dantes You need to send an eMail since I'm guaranteed to receive it, whereas a UA-cam comment I'm very liable to miss as UA-cam does NOT notify me of every comment received, plus I can't timestamp them properly. :P
I've known about rubber banding at least since the SNES days. Pretty sure even F-Zero had it. But only one way, because your opponents could lap you but you could never lap them no matter how fast you went.
+Ray Ceeya The term itself didn't come about right away as the tricks programmers were using to achieve the rubber band effect were widely varied and no one was revealing them because they didn't want to break the illusion of their games playing fair. :P
Fairly sure I got this for free, either with the PC or bundled with something like speakers, probably with my first family PC as a kid. Did you miss out Leap Those Sheep intentionally, or did you just not come across it? I think it was off the beaten track on the Italy(?) course. A jump ramp with a line of sheep after it. I could never clear the jump without killing at least some of the sheep. I loved exploring the courses as a kid. Although I had a genuine copy, I never remember the music or commentary working. I knew there was meant to be commentary as I saw the option to toggle it in the menu, and you can access the sound files from the disk. However, nothing I did got either to work, so I only had the SFX. Also can confirm it works without disk once installed.
...I NEVER knew about the "Leap the Sheep" ramp! I just went looking for it and yes, it's in that same Italy track and it's actually not hard to find IF you go through the course backwards! ...now I'm gonna have to go through ALL the tracks backwards to see if interesting things have been hidden in that manner! :P
@@Pixelmusement I'll save you some time: fairly sure there wasn't much else you missed! If interested, I spotted on this video on the top comment there's a thread from one of the level designers who lists off some of the map oddities: ua-cam.com/video/VpOeYt1HXmM/v-deo.html. He also mentions he intentionally made it so you couldn't clear all the sheep in the jump. That's a chunk of my childhood wasted then!! Also, bafflingly, some sheep are immortal (treat like hard objects so you just bounce off them). Not sure why. Great game. For a freebie, I sunk an crazy amount of time into it. The split screen really was appreciated.
Interestingly, in parts of your video where I can barely hear the music under sound effects and your voice, it strongly reminds me of Firestarter (the 1984 movie) soundtrack, like Crystal Voice by Tangerine Dream. I'm sure if I were to listen to them on their own, they would sound nothing like it.
Only if the framerate matches the physics rate. I can confirm the camera issues are present even on real hardware, if said hardware is powerful enough to drive the framerate high, such as on a Pentium system with a decent non-accelerated graphics card for the time. :B
Holy Sh%t i just played this for the firt time in like 25 years on my retro pc a p3 with a 800mhz cpu an a gf2 mx440. the shake on the camera makes it unplayable i cant even remember if back in the day my 400mhz machine would suffer that badly from it. such a shame.
You could try 1nsane by Codemasters. Racing game, but also with explorable maps. Not as big as these though, and much less variety. Makes up for it with the interesting gameplay modes (Destruction Zone, Capture the Flag) and the tons of community-generated content (maps and vehicles). One of the oldest games we still play at LAN parties :)
The game did not run at 70fps on hardware of the time, not even Pentiums, due to video bandwidth limitations. What you're seeing in dosbox is the result of unrealistic video speed emulation. The devs never saw that behavior because it was impossible on real hardware. Yet another peril of dosbox.
+Jim Leonard I remember the framerate being over 35 for sure on my P120 when running in 320x200, although I do recall the framerate was lower at the full 640x480 SVGA resolution. Now I'm curious what kinds of systems the devs were using. :o
The camera looks jittery to me the entire video. There's no difference between the "bad" part where you warn viewers to shrink the window and the rest. Also I played this game a lot as a kid and the camera behaved exactly the same. I always thought it was intentional, to make the game feel more "offroad".
I used to love going off the beaten path and exploring in Test Drive 3. I remember that game having an amazing amount of content off the beaten path. Only thing was it was finicky about the game speed. It always ran a bit too fast on my computer. I think the game's engine was tied to the CPU clock speed and so you had to have a specific setup to run it at the correct speed. Anyway, I think I spent more time exploring than racing in that game.
Pixelmusement , yeah I watched that UA-camr you mentioned in this video (he has a TD3 review), and he showed that too. It's funny, I don't remember it doing that. Addmittedly though, it was a LONG time ago when I played it last. I also admittedly had a cracked version back then too. Maybe they removed that, Idk. Maybe I just forgot.
Also, the viewpoint looking down when you get hit isn't a bug. You actually got freelook in 1st person. So it can be counteracted by playing with that and you can use it to look out the side windows etc.
+Kristus That doesn't make it less of a bug, especially considering if you're playing with a joystick or gamepad you're not gonna have a hand on the mouse to deal with that. :P
can you do next game, like Wipeout clone on PC called Killer Loop, also known as Magforce Racing, I'm having trouble to run it on modern PC, so maybe you can figure it out. its also a long forgotten PC games.
Okay so... you have Ross down pat. You have the cadence and joke style perfect. You could actually write scripts for him or pay someone to make a deep fake and easily pass yourself off as Ross, but... now don't take this wrong, you don't have the attitude for it. Regardless of your past, you can _tell_ Ross is a guy who thinks he's a secrete genius and has just used his 0 ambition to stave off the existential dread of being a security guard and other "do nothing until you die" worker. You, on the other hand, sound more like his friend, Tom (from moon gaming) who is much happier with his life but interacting with those of us who suffer. I hope that's true, i mean tbh all of us suffer an all of us can only know our own personal rock bottoms, but i always hope most people's "rock bottoms" aren't worse than they need them to be.
@@Pixelmusement It was really good, like I implied, you could be ghost writer and I don't think anyone would notice. I had an idea years ago to make a YT review channel where I reviewed other channels in their style, until I tried it and realized how hard it was to parody more than the few people I really liked. This gave me a second wind for it. If I find time I may make my dream channel after all.
good imitation of Ross' style. I really feel for the guy. Hope his situation improves.
Oh, man! This game is VERY nostalgic to me.
It may not be an amazing game or anything, but it was one of my most played co-op games when I was a kid. Me and my older brother would play until our eyes pop out. This game just made us laugh all the time and, at the time, it was all that mattered to me.
Since you were asking about how to access the unused CITY3.LEV course...I FOUND A WAY. (And it doesn't even involve any wacky hex editor hijinks or anything of that sort.)
HOW TO DRIVE ON THE UNUSED CITY3.LEV COURSE
Step 1:
Create a "city3" sound folder by copying one of the other sound folders (I used the "city1" folder). (I don't know if you actually need to do this, but I did it just in case.)
Step 2:
Start up the game by typing the following at the DOS prompt:
racing -rec -lev city3 -cfg [configfile]
...where [configfile] is the filename (without extension) of the configuration file you're using. (Technically, the "-cfg [configfile]" part is optional, but you'll need it if you don't want to get stuck with the default settings.)
Step 3:
In this menu, there is a column of six white squares to the left; click them to change them to the game's "normal" color options (red, blue, yellow, green, orange, purple). (If I'm not mistaken, they indicate the NPC driver color settings; don't leave them white because that's (partially) what's causing the issues with loading the course in the first place.)
Step 4:
Click the "OK, LET'S RECORD!" button.
This will put you into a race...or at least some kind of race-like situation. The NPC drivers will be glitched out, but at least you'll be able to drive around and stuff.
By the way, I'm sure this isn't the only way to access this course; I've heard of ways to make it selectable in the game menu system, but that stuff involves a hex editor, and I don't need no stinkin' hex editor. :p
Here's a video of me flying around the CITY3.LEV course in a helicopter (which I had to use the -car command line option to be able to use):
ua-cam.com/video/zgqpFZ89vL0/v-deo.html
Ryu/Ken from Street Fighter -> Kenwood ... Ryuwood
+Lord Vetinari ...that makes more sense! :D
For games that for the 'fun and exploration first, racing second' school of design, look no further than the Carmageddon series. You don't even have to race on the tracks to complete the races, and exploration is the entire ethos, with secrets and powerups scattered all around. A huge variety of tracks and cars, too. It's pretty violent, and a little immature at times, but the freedom you have when playing is just superb!
+Andrew Smee The only trouble with Carmageddon is that the racing isn't even second; it's like barely seventh place. ;D
I think I'm a little late, but another game, which seems like the developers forgot about racing halfway through making it, is Sonic R. The levels are not as unnecessarily big as in BRR, but it looks like the game is more about collecting hidden coins and chaos emeralds than racing. At least that's the impression I've got from Nerd3 video.
EDIT: For anyone interested, a fixed cycles setting of 200,000 seems to be a decent balance between smooth graphics and not too much jittery camera movement.
When I was a kid, I always wondered why they had one smiley face with a weird red arrow on it. I was today years old when I realized it was a reference to Watchmen.
I can't remember if I had much trouble beating the AI opponents in this game. Most of what I remember is that I favored tracks that allowed me to drive all over the place without worrying about getting stuck. Ones where you could safely break out of the assigned route and just drive across endless miles of flat terrain. I think one of the tracks where your vehicle choices were either a Jeep or ATV even had some kind of weird mountain hidden out in the depths of the unused map, and I used to love flying off of it at ridiculous speed.
The music playing during the clip at 10:56 reminds me an awful lot of the main theme of the movie The Running Man.
Great job as always, Ross-... Uh, I mean Kris!
Nice format!
I hope Ross will have his appartment problems solved.
P.S.: Your CGA & PC-Speaker version of Game Dungeon intro is awesome!
I love the ryuwood reference - famous electronics (particularly good car stereo) company called Kenwood - so a nifty Street Fighter reference.
Fantastic video.
You make half an hour pass like it's 5 minutes.
Love seeing neat little secrets and details like seen in BRR, it just tells me the devs truly cared.
This sort of attention to detail is why I can't get into a lot of modern games, because they just feel like stale clean products rather than video games with character.
Carmageddon is one of the best in this aspect, cause you can spend like 3 times more playing the outside content rather than just doing the wreck racing.
Great review and deep dive into the details! Played this game a lot back in the day.
I was obsessed with this game when I was a kid. And when you get bored you could go off the track and seemingly cruise around a limitless planet. I don't remember the shaky camera it was silky smooth
Diddy Kong Racing also had a lot of exploration, not only in the hub track but also in normal tracks where you had to explore for items or shortcuts.
i enjoyed this video, thank you. i played it as a kid and it was great. good to see it again.
ah, the 90's games, where they even got creative, experimental and funny with the game menus. this game is very nostalgic to me
Loved this game to bits back in the day. Nostalgia overload.
19:20 Your voice matches up perfectly with the drum beats in the music, and it sounds like you're rapping, making it really jarring when I noticed this and you didn't rhyme afterwards. I half expected:
There's also a replay feature,
and this is really fun.
You can record a replay
of any race you've done.
While not available on computers, a good exploration/racing experience is Road Trip Adventure on the PS2. Always loved the idea of being able to take a casual drive in a racing game and explore easter eggs dotted around the map.
thank you very much for this perfect format of this video !!! and for apreciating the works of Ross Scott !!! :D
It's cool to see you review one of my childhood games, which also got me into the racing genre.
There's one fun fact about the BRR's AI, mainly how it really isn't an AI.
You see, the AI drivers are actually a recording of 6 players driving in multiplayer.
In single player, the recording is played back, with the player taking role of one of the drivers in recording.
Rubberbanding happens by the game speeding up the recording when the player is in the lead.
You can notice this by playing the same track with same character and color.
The "AI" drivers always finish the race in same order. Another way to notice this is by doing a head-on collision. Doing this with "AI" driver ends up with the player's vehicle flying.
But the head-on collision between two human players leads to both of their vehicles being pushed into opposite directions.
Thus, the game is most fun in 6 player multiplayer, though finding people to play this old game would be difficult.
Which is a shame, as this game would have been one of my favorite DOS racing games,
if it had a proper AI who can do nasty tricks like sideswiping while at the same time be vulnerable to making mistakes, like in Fatal Racing (or Whiplash, as it was known in the US).
Another fun fact about the game is that it was supposed to have a expansive backstory and description on every vehicle in the game.
Keith Stuart, the man wrote all of the lore, wrote an article in Eurogamer about the video game lore in general.
In the article, he revealed that the game was about this "Intergalactic Racing League"
and that the vehicles were supposed to feature reviews from fictitious magazines such as "Mud Buggy Enthusiast".
All of this stuff was supposed to be included in the game's manual, which was then scrapped because
Domark (The publisher) thought the manual's printing costs were too high for a simple racing game as this.
And so, Stuart ends up throwing all of it away instead of, you know, dump the lore into a .TXT or .DOC file
and put it into the CD along with the game. At least that way the folks interested about the lore wouldn't be bummed by the lack of it.
BTW, this is one of those games, which Source Code I would LOVE to see released nowadays.
I only had the demo but I played it to death, mostly not racing at all, just exploring and goofing around. Brings back memories. Thanks!
You need way more screaming and grunt noises to be like accursedfarms lol, but it's still a great tribute XD
+HPZeta I don't scream at anything in real life, so my screams sound... weeeeird... XD
Pixelmusement I am just glad we both enjoy Rosses work :)
I would love a spiritual successor to the Monster Truck Madness games. I loved when I found a soccer field in one of the early games and you could play with a soccer ball. I miss games like that.
I think LGR said he played Duke Nukem 3D in the tiny window at reduced frame rate when his computers weren't powerful enough to run it full screen. I can't tell what would be worse, a racing game or an FPS at a 1x1.5 inch screen.
Lassi Kinnunen I played quake like that on my Am5x86-P75-S :)
Graphics and controls were a bit clunky but this game was AWESOME fun multiplayer, either against my brother in split screen or between Doom/RTS games when my mates came round for a LAN weekend. Definitely a bit of a cult classic
As far as freedom to do whatever the hell in a racing game.. how about Rollcage? That thing pretty much set you loose to do whatever it takes to win.
the physics were realllllly fun
Really nice video. Thanks. Good analysis. I love it. This game was "the rare game" out of the line. Very complete game for this ages.Thats why you remember it a lot. Under my opinion it will be difficult to make another new big red racing ... nowadays everything has changed a lot and the youth have another point of view for gaming, they dont pay attention to details like that in videogames....
This was good. I do hope Ross's situation improves soon.
One of my favourite games way back when! Sure, the stereotype one-liners are appalling and I never really noticed the shaking camera. But the gameplay, the different tracks, vehicles, weird sound bites ("Put your pedal to the metal!") and music... so unique, so awesome.
It is kind of weird. The designs of the vehicles (especially the jeeps with the decals on the hood) seem so familiar to me; but I have no recollection of the rest of this game. I can't tell if that's because i've just forgotten a lot about this game, or if the assets were used in some other game that I've played.
The vehicle designs in this really remind me of Stunt Race FX for the SNES (sans the cartoon eyeballs, of course).
RYUWOOD is a play on Kenwood (company that makes audio equipment) and .. guess which famous 90s fighting game :)
great reveiw...good game!
About the music I kind of feel it added to the whole atmosphere of the game which was quite surreal for a racing game.
Edit: also nice to see I was not the only one who went exploring instead of just racing.
Also I am pretty sure I might still have the "original" copy which was Kixx budget version by Eidos.
.
Aah, I remember loving this game back in the day but I could never remember this super generic name. Great video and thanks for bringing this gem back into my mind!
Great video! I LOVED this game (that "WhooHoo" when you respawn brings it all back)! I seem to remember reading in PC Format in the UK, who only reviewed retail games, that the bad reviews were mainly based off the review release. The retail release was held back for a few months for tweaking and bug fixes as a result. Happy days.
+Neil Black And there were indeed lots of patches put out. I did have the game fully patched for this video. ;)
Pixelmusement Oh yeah, wasn't suggesting that. Just sharing some trivia that popped back into my head after 20+ years (doesn't seem that long!)... that some of the bad early magazine reviews were based on a non-retail release that wasn't as fun to play.
Pity you missed an easter egg by disabling commentary: namely WHO the commentators were.
Jon St. John, normally the voice of Duke Nukem, really went all out, as did the Duke3D VO director, Lani Minella.
...At least I read the credits after playing the Demo. :P
+John
F. Donnelly Probably would've missed it anyways as I don't have the manual. :P
...Neither did I. ...I still remember accessing a credit roll somewhere...
Then again, it's been decades ago now. o.o
+John
F. Donnelly There is indeed a credits roll in the game, but it's fairly slow and watching the racing in the background just makes me want to play the game instead. ;)
Big Red Racing was one of the first warez titles I downloaded. Loved the game and multiplayer, when working properly, is fun.
I posted that before i saw the end of the video!
Ryuwood instead of Kenwood is one of the greatest and most creative easter-egg/hommage ever done in video game history!
Only other game I have played like this was San Francisco Rush on the N64. So many cool secret areas to find.
Awesome, I really loved it
Forza Horizon 3-4 are what you're looking for spiritual successor wise
The Camera shake is definitely a symptom of running the game on a machine much faster then intended. It never did this on my old system because running at too high of a framerate was the last of our problems with computers of the day.
An interesting angle on the game dungeon format. I'd love to see the 'show don't tell' principle shown more love though. Those stereotypical comments - I'd love to hear them, not just listen to your impressions of them (not that I wouldn't want to hear your impressions).
I agree, there needs to be a new Big Red Racing successor! There hasn't been one for over 20 years and no indie developer has even attempted to make one! Come on, guys! Let's give this game another shot!
Also, I like this review style, but I still think you should provide the specs for getting it to run in DOSBox, as that is part of why I watch your reviews. Though hearing I can run this in SVGA by pressing the plus key, is already big news for me.
+Cyberbrickmaster1986 I mention in the video to just set a fixed cycles count in DOSBox. You'll need to tweak it a bit to find what's comfortable for you in terms of framerate vs. shakiness. :B
I didn't know what fixed cycle to set it to. But I've already got it set to 20,000 cycles and it works fine in VGA mode. Haven't tested it in SVGA, as I didn't know you could get SVGA in the game.
As for what I think about the game itself, well.. despite being made in 1996, the graphics weren't very good for the time, but it did have a lot of content and it was all quite fun to play with some pretty good attention to detail with the use of open world maps, even if they were just a cosmetic part of the game. Also, I can kind of put up with some of the announcers, even if some of the stereotypes weren't very accurate. The Australian one keeps mentioning about a Kiwi Bird, even though those things are only found in New Zealand and are a protected endangered species. Also, I feel like they could've done more with counting down in the courses native languages, as they did it for only some countries, but not the ones in Asia or Africa for some reason. Even though they used a foreign language for Ireland, despite the number of Irish that can speak English.
+Lassi Kinnunen Do you know anything else about the game? Because I wouldn't know where to look judging by your description.
Also, while injection may technically be better than canisters because of the granularity, canisters are definitely better once you learn the tracks and know when to use the boosts, since the total amount of boost is much higher for canisters. (a full injection tank is only worth about 3 canisters or so IIRC)
+Max Injection still has one MASSIVE advantage over canisters though in that you can pulse it for just a second after resetting or right from the starting line to immediately get yourself up to full speed! :o
what's the recommended DOSBox adjustments to reduce/eliminate the camera shake?
You need to set a fixed cycles count which reduces the framerate to more precisely match the render rate. I actually forget what I had set it to while recording footage for this video since the shakey-cam doesn't actually bother me all that much, but DOSBox allows you to set the cycleup and cycledown increments so if you start with something like 50,000, set the up and down rates to 10,000 per press, then go into the game and pump the resolution up to maximum, you can then use CTRL+F11 and CTRL+F12 to fine-tune the cycles until the framerate and camera shakiness is around where you want it! :B
Ooooh. Big Red Racing. It is the first time I'm hearing of it since I've played it.
This is one of the games that I most enjoyed playing and recording for my channel. Despite its apparent graphic simplicity, it is really fun.
I thought it was DEE-cals not deck-uls. (not a native speaker)
+tsoliman I've heard both from various people in my life so I don't honestly know which is right or if both are right, so I just say it however I feel like saying it. :P
Native speaker - "DEE-cals" is how I've always pronounced it. (Likely learned from an employee at a model train/model car/model airplane store as a kid.)
@Pixelmusement @7:00 About the camera juddering. Believe me - the developers noticed it. But it was almost certainly a necessary RUN-time optimisation for the game to be able to run as fast as it did on consumer machines of the day. That is why the pre-rendered clips showed no such issue - they were not rendered in real time, as the optimisation was turned OFF to get a higher quality render. It probably took at least a second to render each frame for the intro - not quick enough to play, but yes, very smooth looking with the frames put together and run, after the fact, at 30-60 FPS! @7:44 You won't be able to fix it; such setups will be hardcoded constants and/or bitshifting offsets set in the source code for the release build, and will have been set such due to fixed minimum hardware limitations at the time. There would have been a separate developer build for judderless camera; without the source code, there is no getting that back. The shaking has nothing to do with the physics vs refresh rate. It has to do with large rotational increments.
This was probably some sort of camera / view matrix optimisation, e.g. fitting each matrix element into 5 or 6 bits so as to fit extra working data into the registers, so as to use CPU cache line and register space as efficiently as possible to do very fast camera calculations. This means the precision would have been very low, causing the coarseness of rotation and thus the juddering you see. One way to look at this is to say 2^6 bits = 64 different values or only about 20 steps around the entire unit circle, thus increments of more than 5 degrees rotation would be the minimum step! Modern GPUs do this easily because they can process an entire 4x4 matrix in parallel, with each element being a full 32-bit width floating point value.
Without this, it probably would not have been possible to ship a game running in real time speeds _at all_. Think about that before complaining too much - and yes, my mates and I also hated the shuddering camera, but we still loved the game.
I mean, it's not impossible that it's an optimization thing, but given that the jitter goes away if the framerate is low enough and given that if you analyze the individual frames you can see the interpolation seemingly working backwards I'm pretty convinced this is a bug, not an optimizing shortcoming. Ultimately, unless someone unearths the original source code we may never know for certain. :P
Awesome game, I played the heck out of it as a child myself. I remember loving the first person view, awkward though it may be, because I found it so immersive. Also, it seems the game devs were flatlanders XD
Great video :)
Am I the only one the only one thinking Terminal Velocity? The way the 3d renders looks so much like that. If it's from the same company it might have taunts you can activate with the number keys.
+Sean Lavoie Terminal Velocity was done by an entirely different company and the engines definitely render very differently from each other. Granted, I do get where you're coming from with that notion, but no, they're not related at all. :B
@@Pixelmusement Thank you for the info :)
Too bad you didnt get to experience this games multiplayer with a friend :( Thats where it shined the most. Maybe next time try to collab with some other retro YTubers?
My best friend and I spend over two weeks playing this game alone just after he got his first PC. Sure, there were Need for Speed, Hi-Octane, Fatal Racing, Destruction Derby and Screamer at the start of 1996, but none of them offered Split Screen!
Btw I cant remember SVGA mode nor camera shaking, maybe Pentium 133 was just too slow.
I think Ryuwood is just a Street Fighter joke, since it rips off the Kenwood logo
Three things:
#1: You can actually set the vision/texture distances a bit further than 22; I've been able to make the game work fairly well with them both set to 25, which looks like THIS:
ua-cam.com/video/iWS_WNf9N08/v-deo.html
In that video, you should be able to see just a bit further than you normally would be able to. (I haven't thoroughly tested this in SVGA mode, but it seems stable in VGA mode, at least.)
#2: The demo video (0:10 to 1:01 and 7:17 to 7:45 in your video) looks like it was made with a beta version of the game or something; there are different color palettes all over the place, and it looks like that version's Japan course had weird hexagonal-looking trees instead of the ones in the final.
#3: The game doesn't have any actual AI; the opponent drivers are pre-recorded from developer gameplay, similar to the game's built-in replay feature. (The game makes them "rubber-band" by adjusting the playback speed of these recordings.)
+ToiletDuck64 The lowest vision distance I tested above 22 was 26 and that still crashed things, so I figured because there was so little space between 22 and 26, recommending anything higher than 22 wouldn't be a good idea because there's no way I could thoroughly test it. That's also really interesting info about how the "AI" works and actually explains a lot. :o
Why isn't there a remasterd Version of it yet? I loved this game back in 1995!
The camera shakyness never bothered me much tbh. I never even noticed it when I played the demo back in 96.
BRR is fun as hell. I've even played it online thru DOSBox's IPX emulation some time ago.
+Negrostrike The camera shaking never bothered me that much either, until I tried to watch the footage I was recording and realized, "OK, if you're not actually focussing on the race, this is really hard to watch..."
This game came with my Epson Stylus 600 in around 1998. Incredibly fun to play! Oh, and the telephone box looked very British so I looked up the developers, who were based in London. I remember the publishers, Domark, publishing a lot of the arcade conversions on the ZX Spectrum. www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekpub.cgi?regexp=^Domark+Ltd$&loadpics=1
I also don't remember as a kid the camera being so shaky. It's strange how it behaves normal during the track preview and when you hit the 1st person view key. As the camera slowly pans into the 1st person view the jitters subside for a few seconds.
It seems like it was a oversight or bug during the programing of the game? I wonder how many versions of this game exist and if all versions use this issue with the camera.
My first thought was also that it was an emulation issue. Perhaps tied to the way mouse input is handled? But disabling the mouse and trying it within real hardware and on Msdos showed no improvement.
It's a shame the source code has never been released. It be a real thrill to make custom maps for this.
The closest game I know to this, although its more grounded in reality, was the off road racing game 1nsane that came out around 2000 but it did have some wacky vehicles alongside all sorts of off road vehicles.
This is a great format
13:36 "Transparent" has the opposite meaning for non-programmers:
* "easily seen through, recognized, or detected"
* "manifest; obvious"
(www.dictionary.com/browse/transparent)
"Transparent" in computer science (and related contexts) means the user won't notice it.
* www.webopedia.com/definitions/transparent/
* www.techopedia.com/definition/3400/network-transparency
Unforgettable game.
There's one secret you missed mentioning, and it's probably the best one out of the lot.
You can get any vehicle on any track. I do have memories of changing file names (COPTER.VHC to JEEP.VHC for example) to do it when I was young, but that doesn't seem to work on the version I downloaded to test. It ends up in an endless loading loop trying to get into the race, so I'm guessing it was patched out (Like the Excelsior Phase One name bug). You can still do it though with a command line, though.
Add ' -car (vehicle 1) -car (vehicle 2)' to the command to run the game using those vehicles.
I have fond memories of flying around with the Heli and just exploring all the maps.
+Shade
Millith I would've mentioned it if there were secret vehicles to drive. Might be possible to fly the UFO which replaces the helicopters for the flyby previews on the interplanetary courses, but the file which contains all the data for the UFO is very small, suggesting it might be lacking some of the data necessary for that.
I didn't mean secret vehicles, just a secret to use any vehicle on any map. Really useful for exploring.
And the UFO is actually usable. It's like a much less floaty, but slower helicopter.
ua-cam.com/video/RDQqIktQyDg/v-deo.html
That was great! You nailed the RGD vibe in your own style, I just missed the awards ;'(
... NEXT Freeman's Mind WHEN
a jon st john / lani minella demo tape with a racing game attached to it
this game is a masterpiece.
Isn't 1nsane and Fuel somewhat in the same vein when it comes to the exploration aspects?
It's no Ross, but it'll do.
+Jomaster The Second No one can replace Ross, but I can still encourage others to check out his stuff! :)
Man, the one I manage to guess correctly does not have the mention at the end! I am going back to my nostalgic depression!
Very nice video though, with a very fun game I only played as a demo back in the 90`s, that had only 2 tracks.
Kris, I just thought that some information you put in your videos (if game is commercial, DOSbox cycles, etc.) could make way after credits or at least in the youtube comments.
+Gerson Silva I thought about adding in the Patreon/Guess stuff, but I wanted to maintain the format as closely as possible to Ross's. I can put a mention for the correct guess in the next episode. ;)
Response to trophy #3, 4x4 Evo.i loved just going all over on those tracks, and the physics were a joy.
But still there were missions designed for exploring the places. BRR does not have anything like this. but I agree that 4x4 is a very fun game to play
Hold on... First person BreakOut. I gotta try that.
Hey has anyone done a VR breakout yet?
Sorry, I'm slightly obsessed with Arkanoid clones.
+Ray Ceeya Nothing wrong with craving a particular genre of game! ;)
Except when that craving can't be filled. I really want another game like Moraff's World with all its no plot and such shenanigans, but it just doesn't exist.
Interesting. Had to look it up. Never hear of the game, but something bothered me as soon as I read that. and I just placed it. I saw "Moraff's World", but I heard in my head, "Welcome to Morlach's famous shop" , from Mass Effect 1.
Also the game sounds really intriguing. A bit of rogue-like crossed with epic adventure. Maybe an early attempt at a 100% proceduraly generated epic RPG. Sort of the holy grail of RPGs, right? A game you can play through 1000 times and every time completely different.
At least that's what I get from it.
+Ray Ceeya I've covered Moraff's World on my channel if you want to learn more about it: ua-cam.com/video/G1MNrDgr7ow/v-deo.html
I actually remember playing the game that Kris uses as an example of a first-person Breakout clone, but I can't remember the name. It was one of many games played during my own digs into those "thousand games" CDs of my youth.
Ryuwood is Kenwood , the logos look the same too
I played the demo of BRR a ton when I was a kid, good to see that the framerate is actually ass and it wasn't just my 486/66 :D
Great vid, glad to see you love Ross's Game Dungeon too!
A neat game. I wonder why I've never heard about it.
+IllidanS4 I don't think it was on store shelves long. I was never able to find a legit copy as a kid back when it was SUPPOSED to be for sale and I never found used copies either at game stores back then. :/
Question, do people have to email you to send in guesses or can just posting here in the comments count?
+Jispy
Moe Dantes You need to send an eMail since I'm guaranteed to receive it, whereas a UA-cam comment I'm very liable to miss as UA-cam does NOT notify me of every comment received, plus I can't timestamp them properly. :P
I've known about rubber banding at least since the SNES days. Pretty sure even F-Zero had it. But only one way, because your opponents could lap you but you could never lap them no matter how fast you went.
+Ray Ceeya The term itself didn't come about right away as the tricks programmers were using to achieve the rubber band effect were widely varied and no one was revealing them because they didn't want to break the illusion of their games playing fair. :P
Fairly sure I got this for free, either with the PC or bundled with something like speakers, probably with my first family PC as a kid. Did you miss out Leap Those Sheep intentionally, or did you just not come across it? I think it was off the beaten track on the Italy(?) course. A jump ramp with a line of sheep after it. I could never clear the jump without killing at least some of the sheep. I loved exploring the courses as a kid.
Although I had a genuine copy, I never remember the music or commentary working. I knew there was meant to be commentary as I saw the option to toggle it in the menu, and you can access the sound files from the disk. However, nothing I did got either to work, so I only had the SFX.
Also can confirm it works without disk once installed.
...I NEVER knew about the "Leap the Sheep" ramp! I just went looking for it and yes, it's in that same Italy track and it's actually not hard to find IF you go through the course backwards! ...now I'm gonna have to go through ALL the tracks backwards to see if interesting things have been hidden in that manner! :P
@@Pixelmusement I'll save you some time: fairly sure there wasn't much else you missed!
If interested, I spotted on this video on the top comment there's a thread from one of the level designers who lists off some of the map oddities: ua-cam.com/video/VpOeYt1HXmM/v-deo.html. He also mentions he intentionally made it so you couldn't clear all the sheep in the jump. That's a chunk of my childhood wasted then!!
Also, bafflingly, some sheep are immortal (treat like hard objects so you just bounce off them). Not sure why.
Great game. For a freebie, I sunk an crazy amount of time into it. The split screen really was appreciated.
Interestingly, in parts of your video where I can barely hear the music under sound effects and your voice, it strongly reminds me of Firestarter (the 1984 movie) soundtrack, like Crystal Voice by Tangerine Dream. I'm sure if I were to listen to them on their own, they would sound nothing like it.
Shaky camera is an issue anly on a new PC and DosBox !
It works fine on PC from era!
Only if the framerate matches the physics rate. I can confirm the camera issues are present even on real hardware, if said hardware is powerful enough to drive the framerate high, such as on a Pentium system with a decent non-accelerated graphics card for the time. :B
@@Pixelmusement cpu for this game is 486 100Mhz!
@@szyszka8303 You could get a 100 MHz Pentium chip BEFORE the 100 MHz 486 chips were released. :P
@@Pixelmusement so what?
a masterpiece of fun...I loved the comments!
Holy Sh%t i just played this for the firt time in like 25 years on my retro pc a p3 with a 800mhz cpu an a gf2 mx440. the shake on the camera makes it unplayable i cant even remember if back in the day my 400mhz machine would suffer that badly from it. such a shame.
I got this free with an Epson printer in 1997!
+eccIefechan Interesting combination... Buy a printer, get a free game! I mean, happens with video cards all the time, but printers? Really? XD
You could try 1nsane by Codemasters. Racing game, but also with explorable maps. Not as big as these though, and much less variety. Makes up for it with the interesting gameplay modes (Destruction Zone, Capture the Flag) and the tons of community-generated content (maps and vehicles).
One of the oldest games we still play at LAN parties :)
The game did not run at 70fps on hardware of the time, not even Pentiums, due to video bandwidth limitations. What you're seeing in dosbox is the result of unrealistic video speed emulation. The devs never saw that behavior because it was impossible on real hardware. Yet another peril of dosbox.
+Jim
Leonard I remember the framerate being over 35 for sure on my P120 when running in 320x200, although I do recall the framerate was lower at the full 640x480 SVGA resolution. Now I'm curious what kinds of systems the devs were using. :o
I've actually managed to get the CITY3 track working in split-screen multiplayer.
Here's a video of it: ua-cam.com/video/LX5tciWglAY/v-deo.html
The camera looks jittery to me the entire video. There's no difference between the "bad" part where you warn viewers to shrink the window and the rest. Also I played this game a lot as a kid and the camera behaved exactly the same. I always thought it was intentional, to make the game feel more "offroad".
the shaky camera ruins this game for me if someone patched it I would totally play this to hell and back
oof that camera makes me feel unwell
I used to love going off the beaten path and exploring in Test Drive 3. I remember that game having an amazing amount of content off the beaten path.
Only thing was it was finicky about the game speed. It always ran a bit too fast on my computer. I think the game's engine was tied to the CPU clock speed and so you had to have a specific setup to run it at the correct speed.
Anyway, I think I spent more time exploring than racing in that game.
+anthonyspecf TD3 also chides you to get back on the road every moment or two and you can only crash so many times before it cuts you off entirely. :P
Pixelmusement , yeah I watched that UA-camr you mentioned in this video (he has a TD3 review), and he showed that too. It's funny, I don't remember it doing that. Addmittedly though, it was a LONG time ago when I played it last. I also admittedly had a cracked version back then too. Maybe they removed that, Idk. Maybe I just forgot.
Also, the viewpoint looking down when you get hit isn't a bug. You actually got freelook in 1st person. So it can be counteracted by playing with that and you can use it to look out the side windows etc.
+Kristus That doesn't make it less of a bug, especially considering if you're playing with a joystick or gamepad you're not gonna have a hand on the mouse to deal with that. :P
I totally agree its a but, if anything camera should be going up showing you the headliner. I mean c'mon, think of the physics!
You say bug I say feature.
can you do next game, like Wipeout clone on PC called Killer Loop, also known as Magforce Racing, I'm having trouble to run it on modern PC, so maybe you can figure it out. its also a long forgotten PC games.
the menu font should not be.
should not i say!
Okay so... you have Ross down pat. You have the cadence and joke style perfect. You could actually write scripts for him or pay someone to make a deep fake and easily pass yourself off as Ross, but... now don't take this wrong, you don't have the attitude for it. Regardless of your past, you can _tell_ Ross is a guy who thinks he's a secrete genius and has just used his 0 ambition to stave off the existential dread of being a security guard and other "do nothing until you die" worker. You, on the other hand, sound more like his friend, Tom (from moon gaming) who is much happier with his life but interacting with those of us who suffer. I hope that's true, i mean tbh all of us suffer an all of us can only know our own personal rock bottoms, but i always hope most people's "rock bottoms" aren't worse than they need them to be.
I mean, there's a reason why I do my style and he does his, I just thought it would be fun to try a video in his style! ;)
@@Pixelmusement It was really good, like I implied, you could be ghost writer and I don't think anyone would notice. I had an idea years ago to make a YT review channel where I reviewed other channels in their style, until I tried it and realized how hard it was to parody more than the few people I really liked. This gave me a second wind for it. If I find time I may make my dream channel after all.
i love this game
At first I thought this was going to be a collaboration episode.
The shaking camera... not a bug, but a feature? Make it look more authentic?
Thuz Life
My first thought was whether or not it was a reference to Ross' Game Dungeon. Haha.
You should check out Baldies