After this video I played some more and explored the upgrades, and I really like the missiles in this game! They are prohibitively expensive, and you can only have one in each launcher, front and rear, but they are devastating! I love the way they leave the motionless corpse on the track in perpetuity. Awesome stuff.
I did check it out and I can't believe you prefer how the SFX work! The way the music cuts out almost completely to play the (almost identicle) screesching tyre noises is really jarring! Still, each to their own, I suppose! Having said that, the gameplay looks great, it always amazes me how programmers got the Speccy to do 8 way scrolling - it's like the alchemy of the programming world. Thanks for the recommendation.
I played it a bit more after I stopped recording and things definitely heat up in the later stages, making it worthwhile saving and buying a new car early on.
Thanks for the suggestions! I've played Super Sprint on this channel already, but I'll put the others on the 'to play' list. I remember a demo of Indy Heat, on a cover disk of ST Action, iirc. It was only one track, but I had lots of fun with it. Of the others, I haven't played Hot Wheels (toy related?) or Power Up, so I'll look forward to those.
You're welcome, Dave. Thanks for watching and commenting! It's a shame the STE wasn't more of an upgrade. I think they were too worried about backwards compatibility (and still ballsed that up). They should have made it a true upgrade: faster CPU and games centric hardware would have given it a fighting chance later against the Amiga. But I don't suppose anything would have stopped the onslaught of the consoles.
That's a shame, if you liked the sequel, there's plenty to enjoy in the original, and it is interesting to see where all those ideas started. The car dealer sections are especially good and indicate what was to come later with the reporter/examiner/greenpeace sections. Hopefully you'll find a good copy soon!
But the sound effects are so bad that I actually really appreciate the ability to turn them off and listen to the rathre nice music! Don't take that away from me! :D Thanks for watching!
Loved the salesman in this. The sound effects sucked, yeah, but sadly that was true of so many ST games I guess we got used to it! (STE-specific games were much better sound-wise of course, but they mainly started coming out when the whole 16-bit market had basically died,) Anyway there are a lot of things you could criticise about the first Supercars game, but I still have extremely fond memories of it. Remember all of those tracks! Thanks for the memories. :-D
The only thing missing is that in the Speccy version the SFX cut into the music which works a lot better than msx or sfx . The Supercars 1 music is classic :D
The cars were all plainly based on real world ones, btw. The one you think is an NSX was actually that AFAIK ... the small blue one was an Alfa of some kind... can't remember the white one, possibly a lambo. I always thought the red one looked like an MG Maestro, top-down, though!
I was never much of a car nut, but even I was impressed by the rendering of those cars outside the dealership! This, Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge, Crazy Cars 2 and Test Drive were both augmented by authentic looking cars, certainly adding to the appeal for me and my uncle. The white one here was indeed a Lamborghini Countach, a car that graced many a teenage boy's wall during the 80's.
Yes, that's the one :) I'll admit that it was only ever a hunch until I looked it up and found that someone had done a side by side comparison of the game cars with their realworld inspirations... They could well have been completely made up for all I really knew.
It is rather good. Too easy early on, as you can see here, but things really start to heat up later on. Did you play the sequel? It's even better (arguably).
Yeah, that was always my preferred strategy. Of course I liked visiting the car salesman whether I intended to buy a car or not! :-D Missiles were virtually pointless in this game - spin assist was essential later on though. I know others have mentioned it, but did you ever play Power Up? More a straight racing game, STE only. Pretty good fun all told. Quite liked Badlands too, as someone also mentioned. But Super Cars for some reason has a special place in my heart!
If I remember correctly, it starts getting quite tough at around the 4th race in the second time round the tracks (you restart the tracks after completing all 9).
I only had Supercars 2 as a kid... I did find a copy of Supercars 1 on sale and was very happy and curious what it would be like... but had an error on a floppy so it didn't work :(
Probably not. The things that really killed the STE were the compatibility problems (though to be honest TOS 1.62 wasn't all that bad),STILL only 16 colours on screen (what was the point of increasing the palette from 512 to 4096 cols without increasing what you could display in one go?!?!?), and low base memory (0.5Mb). I think they were a bit stuck though, they'd never have achieved the sales to get developers properly interested in using its full potential. DMA sound& Blitter were still good
Power Up (STe) , HotWheels St User cover disk, Super off Road Racer, Indy Heat Super Sprint, Badlands, BMX Simulator, The Spy who loved me. If you want to check out _the_ original top down try 'Jon Andersons Rally Speedway on the Atari XE '
True ... I only knew SC1 all the way through into the emulator days, and SC2 was a right disappointment when I finally got to play it. Only one car, rubbish music, etc... slightly better weapons, sure, but that's about all. Given that it's gonna take a while to skim thru 20 minutes, and your version is obviously off a pirate compilation with the depacking at the start... did you get the bugged rip where the track layout gets desynced from the background graphics layer after the fourth race?
The pirate copy I had back in the day had that problem, so I would always need to restart and choose different tracks to see them all, and never got far enough to save enough money to buy the better cars and power-ups. As far as I can remember, this version is fine, but I can't remember where I got it from. You can get the original from Atarimania, so that will definitely work all the way through.
Heh, same here. We just got used to playing the tracks in a particular rough order, getting through the really complex ones first, hitting track 5 as race 5 so that at least matched up, then doing the simple ones partly from memory and partly from following the other cars :D Turned out that the groups who released those discs realised about it quite quickly and then put out a fixed rips on later discs, but of course, living out in the suburbs of Birmingham, with no modem and only a few other Atari contacts, I never found that until much later when coming back to emulate it... I think it's a mark of how fun a game it was that inamongst a fair old pile of discs we still kept coming back to a half-broken version of it though!
Oh, and if you get to the second round I think they actually reset. But it was a bastard hard game regardless, even with the tracks all correct you couldn't get too far in division 2 unless you were a real gaming god and had managed to be really careful with your money and the dealership minigame to get the fastest car already and always pick the perfect upgrades for each track (as they only stick around for one race each). The other guys were just too fast and too accurate to be casually beaten. Sort of like finally reaching the superleague in Stunt Car Racer. Oh, so you think you're the shit for having beaten both the top-level racers on High Jump and Ski Ramp, huh? Think again... **grinds your nose into the tarmac**
So funny how we would put up with the corrupted graphics, and try to race the course from memory. I don't think I'd have that kind of patience these days! Quite a few comments on this video have been about how sedate the pace and challenge are, but yes, after a while the pressure really hots up and if you haven't invested shrewdly in the Lamborghini and upgraded it, well you're on a hiding to nothing. Aah.. Stunt Car Racer. What a game. The High Jump was always my downfall. So deceptively simple...
ended up using the amiga version of it to test a bunch of half-scrap short-throw projectors brought home from work when my laptop's VGA output packed up and I'd had enough of playing solitaire on the old spare pentium-60 one :D it's quite the experience when you blow it up to an 80-ish inch display on a whitewashed wall.
None. I don't think any of them had good controls and/or collision detection. Badlands was about the same as Supercars, but it also had a cool theme and a bit more interesting than the rest of the crop. Yes, Badlands you might enjoy. :)
If you left track 1 till race 9 ... then you'd probably loose easily :) Track 5 really wants the Power Steering! missiles pah! just a gimmick, but much better in 1 as a subtle tactic rather than a racing shooter game.
This is a superb game. I was trying to think of the name of this to recommend to a friend. I kept going "That game like Micro Machines but isn't..." and I just lost him at that. If i'd show him this vid things would've been different....
Yes, thanks! Haven't heard those tunes or seen the screens in ... almost 30 years... Wow.. so much fun.
Genuinely one of the most pleasant things about making these videos is helping people relive those memories. Glad you enjoyed it!
After this video I played some more and explored the upgrades, and I really like the missiles in this game! They are prohibitively expensive, and you can only have one in each launcher, front and rear, but they are devastating! I love the way they leave the motionless corpse on the track in perpetuity. Awesome stuff.
Glad you gave this a go. The ST didn't have many racing games with the camera on top, and this was one of my favorites. :)
I did check it out and I can't believe you prefer how the SFX work! The way the music cuts out almost completely to play the (almost identicle) screesching tyre noises is really jarring! Still, each to their own, I suppose!
Having said that, the gameplay looks great, it always amazes me how programmers got the Speccy to do 8 way scrolling - it's like the alchemy of the programming world. Thanks for the recommendation.
I played it a bit more after I stopped recording and things definitely heat up in the later stages, making it worthwhile saving and buying a new car early on.
Thanks for the suggestions! I've played Super Sprint on this channel already, but I'll put the others on the 'to play' list. I remember a demo of Indy Heat, on a cover disk of ST Action, iirc. It was only one track, but I had lots of fun with it. Of the others, I haven't played Hot Wheels (toy related?) or Power Up, so I'll look forward to those.
You're welcome, Dave. Thanks for watching and commenting!
It's a shame the STE wasn't more of an upgrade. I think they were too worried about backwards compatibility (and still ballsed that up). They should have made it a true upgrade: faster CPU and games centric hardware would have given it a fighting chance later against the Amiga. But I don't suppose anything would have stopped the onslaught of the consoles.
I'm a big fan of the ST's chip music, I actually think it's aged we'll, unlike the midi and tracker stuff of the same era.
That's a shame, if you liked the sequel, there's plenty to enjoy in the original, and it is interesting to see where all those ideas started. The car dealer sections are especially good and indicate what was to come later with the reporter/examiner/greenpeace sections. Hopefully you'll find a good copy soon!
But the sound effects are so bad that I actually really appreciate the ability to turn them off and listen to the rathre nice music! Don't take that away from me! :D Thanks for watching!
Loved the salesman in this. The sound effects sucked, yeah, but sadly that was true of so many ST games I guess we got used to it! (STE-specific games were much better sound-wise of course, but they mainly started coming out when the whole 16-bit market had basically died,)
Anyway there are a lot of things you could criticise about the first Supercars game, but I still have extremely fond memories of it. Remember all of those tracks! Thanks for the memories. :-D
The only thing missing is that in the Speccy version the SFX cut into the music which works a lot better than msx or sfx . The Supercars 1 music is classic :D
The cars were all plainly based on real world ones, btw. The one you think is an NSX was actually that AFAIK ... the small blue one was an Alfa of some kind... can't remember the white one, possibly a lambo.
I always thought the red one looked like an MG Maestro, top-down, though!
I was never much of a car nut, but even I was impressed by the rendering of those cars outside the dealership! This, Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge, Crazy Cars 2 and Test Drive were both augmented by authentic looking cars, certainly adding to the appeal for me and my uncle.
The white one here was indeed a Lamborghini Countach, a car that graced many a teenage boy's wall during the 80's.
Yes, that's the one :)
I'll admit that it was only ever a hunch until I looked it up and found that someone had done a side by side comparison of the game cars with their realworld inspirations... They could well have been completely made up for all I really knew.
It is rather good. Too easy early on, as you can see here, but things really start to heat up later on. Did you play the sequel? It's even better (arguably).
Yeah, that was always my preferred strategy. Of course I liked visiting the car salesman whether I intended to buy a car or not! :-D Missiles were virtually pointless in this game - spin assist was essential later on though. I know others have mentioned it, but did you ever play Power Up? More a straight racing game, STE only. Pretty good fun all told. Quite liked Badlands too, as someone also mentioned. But Super Cars for some reason has a special place in my heart!
Which others would you recommend? Perhaps I'll make it a series. ;)
Badlands, maybe?
If I remember correctly, it starts getting quite tough at around the 4th race in the second time round the tracks (you restart the tracks after completing all 9).
It's also one of the few games where I really liked the cheesy chip-music!
I only had Supercars 2 as a kid... I did find a copy of Supercars 1 on sale and was very happy and curious what it would be like... but had an error on a floppy so it didn't work :(
Oh yeah I remember that! a well timed shot and all the AI get stuck, or you ram the carcass into an awkward spot on the next lap! :)
Probably not. The things that really killed the STE were the compatibility problems (though to be honest TOS 1.62 wasn't all that bad),STILL only 16 colours on screen (what was the point of increasing the palette from 512 to 4096 cols without increasing what you could display in one go?!?!?), and low base memory (0.5Mb). I think they were a bit stuck though, they'd never have achieved the sales to get developers properly interested in using its full potential. DMA sound& Blitter were still good
Do check it out on the Speccy, it's near identical in gameplay to the ST.
Good Review!
Yeah, good game! On my third ST now after the drive on the last one broke (one I'm using now was from a school skip!).
Power Up (STe) , HotWheels St User cover disk, Super off Road Racer, Indy Heat Super Sprint, Badlands, BMX Simulator, The Spy who loved me. If you want to check out _the_ original top down try 'Jon Andersons Rally Speedway on the Atari XE '
True ... I only knew SC1 all the way through into the emulator days, and SC2 was a right disappointment when I finally got to play it. Only one car, rubbish music, etc... slightly better weapons, sure, but that's about all.
Given that it's gonna take a while to skim thru 20 minutes, and your version is obviously off a pirate compilation with the depacking at the start... did you get the bugged rip where the track layout gets desynced from the background graphics layer after the fourth race?
The pirate copy I had back in the day had that problem, so I would always need to restart and choose different tracks to see them all, and never got far enough to save enough money to buy the better cars and power-ups. As far as I can remember, this version is fine, but I can't remember where I got it from. You can get the original from Atarimania, so that will definitely work all the way through.
Heh, same here. We just got used to playing the tracks in a particular rough order, getting through the really complex ones first, hitting track 5 as race 5 so that at least matched up, then doing the simple ones partly from memory and partly from following the other cars :D
Turned out that the groups who released those discs realised about it quite quickly and then put out a fixed rips on later discs, but of course, living out in the suburbs of Birmingham, with no modem and only a few other Atari contacts, I never found that until much later when coming back to emulate it...
I think it's a mark of how fun a game it was that inamongst a fair old pile of discs we still kept coming back to a half-broken version of it though!
Oh, and if you get to the second round I think they actually reset. But it was a bastard hard game regardless, even with the tracks all correct you couldn't get too far in division 2 unless you were a real gaming god and had managed to be really careful with your money and the dealership minigame to get the fastest car already and always pick the perfect upgrades for each track (as they only stick around for one race each). The other guys were just too fast and too accurate to be casually beaten.
Sort of like finally reaching the superleague in Stunt Car Racer. Oh, so you think you're the shit for having beaten both the top-level racers on High Jump and Ski Ramp, huh? Think again... **grinds your nose into the tarmac**
So funny how we would put up with the corrupted graphics, and try to race the course from memory. I don't think I'd have that kind of patience these days!
Quite a few comments on this video have been about how sedate the pace and challenge are, but yes, after a while the pressure really hots up and if you haven't invested shrewdly in the Lamborghini and upgraded it, well you're on a hiding to nothing.
Aah.. Stunt Car Racer. What a game. The High Jump was always my downfall. So deceptively simple...
ended up using the amiga version of it to test a bunch of half-scrap short-throw projectors brought home from work when my laptop's VGA output packed up and I'd had enough of playing solitaire on the old spare pentium-60 one :D
it's quite the experience when you blow it up to an 80-ish inch display on a whitewashed wall.
Alright. Thanks for the recommendation (and warning!)
Dbug did the full version of Indy Heat last year or so! Hot Wheels not toy related! just a single screen half supercars/supersprint PD effort ;)
None. I don't think any of them had good controls and/or collision detection. Badlands was about the same as Supercars, but it also had a cool theme and a bit more interesting than the rest of the crop. Yes, Badlands you might enjoy. :)
if it's just the music I end up forgetting I am playing a game....! :)
If you left track 1 till race 9 ... then you'd probably loose easily :) Track 5 really wants the Power Steering! missiles pah! just a gimmick, but much better in 1 as a subtle tactic rather than a racing shooter game.
This is a superb game. I was trying to think of the name of this to recommend to a friend. I kept going "That game like Micro Machines but isn't..." and I just lost him at that. If i'd show him this vid things would've been different....