I was playing this the other day (By which I mean, I'd beaten the remake and didn't care for it and wanted the real thing) and decided to beat it as fast as I could, and it was actually a pretty fun speedrun. I don't know how commonly-known this game is, but it was one of the Shareware games I grew up with and the full version was one of the first video games I bought with my own allowance money. It's a top-down racer where you compete in races trying to win and/or destroy the other racers until you can upgrade your car and reach the top of the ranking ladder. But before you mail in your order for the CD, make sure you've got at least a 90MHz Pentium to run it on; you don't want anything less.
From a speedrunning perspective, it's got quite a bit of RNG to it for a racing game, but most of it happens between races. In the races themselves, you can manipulate the other cars well enough, scraping them off on the wall if they try to pass you inside a turn and such, but every time you race there's an Easy, Medium, and Hard race (not to be confused with the easy/medium/hard difficulty you select when starting the game), and the two races you don't sign up for still happen -- the top-seeded racer is constantly getting further away from you because he gets several more points from winning Hard than you win from winning Easy. However, there are twenty racers (counting you) and only twelve of them race at a time, so sometimes the top racers don't even participate.
There's also a bit of strategy involved, though. There are two goals: You need the best car with at least half the upgrades (if playing on the easy difficulty), and you need to get to the top of the ladder (the "boss fight" race happens when you're seeded #1 and aren't tied with anyone; you don't want to get there until you can win the race). There are six cars, and I was only using cars one, four, and six (which is unfortunate because the third car is my favorite). My plan was to win as many races with the first car as I could in Easy or Medium to upgrade it fully and then skip to car four because car four is the first car with twin machine guns: If you destroy a racer, they do not gain points from the race, even if they place second or third. As soon as I get this car, I jump to the Hard races and try to kill all of the racers to stop them from climbing the ladder. Unfortunately, this isn't too easy, because if you're stuck against all three racers who have the best car (it happened to me twice in my 24-race run; the luck.) you'll be struggling to catch them, let alone kill them. However, buying the better cars isn't really an option because the weapon items you buy for each race (spiked bumpers, mines, etc) jump in price at car five and you're on a budget, so I was basically sitting on the fourth car until it was time to race the boss, then spending all of my money on the best car I could get.
I'd like to play the game on the hardest difficulty, but it's ridiculous getting off the ground because you can't win first with the starting car, and your repairs will cost you all of your winnings. There'd be a lot of resetting if your first couple of races pit you against too many racers with cars two and three. But then again, that's speedrunning. I'm not sure I'm serious enough about speedrunning at the moment to do that, though (That is why I am posting in the Casual forum). My best time in five attempts was43:54 realtime and 24 total races
Anyway, it was cool digging out a game I hadn't played in several years and trying to speedrun it. Sucks that my computer doesn't meet the specs, though. When I was building it, I was sure this eight-core AMD would be fast enough, but I had to install this thing called "DOS Box" which I think speeds up my CD-Rom drive to double speed and frees up some disk space so it can copy off all sixteen megs of cinematics? I don't think I even have any megs, they told me gigs were better... maybe I got ripped off. Techno-talk, what does it mean.
As an aside, I've got a question I'll need an answer to if I some day decide to play this seriously enough to submit a run. Would this be considered cheating: Duke Nukem is a playable character, and if you name yourself Duke Nukem you'll have a higher armor rating than is possible to get through upgrades, and it's hidden (you can still buy armor upgrades but they might be useless). It's definitely a necessary strategy to at least select him, even if you have to name him something else to not be cheating, so that there isn't an AI Duke Nukem with an impossible armor rating... Any opinions on this? There are legitimate cheat codes in the game, but this feels different because you have to play against him if you don't take him.
From a speedrunning perspective, it's got quite a bit of RNG to it for a racing game, but most of it happens between races. In the races themselves, you can manipulate the other cars well enough, scraping them off on the wall if they try to pass you inside a turn and such, but every time you race there's an Easy, Medium, and Hard race (not to be confused with the easy/medium/hard difficulty you select when starting the game), and the two races you don't sign up for still happen -- the top-seeded racer is constantly getting further away from you because he gets several more points from winning Hard than you win from winning Easy. However, there are twenty racers (counting you) and only twelve of them race at a time, so sometimes the top racers don't even participate.
There's also a bit of strategy involved, though. There are two goals: You need the best car with at least half the upgrades (if playing on the easy difficulty), and you need to get to the top of the ladder (the "boss fight" race happens when you're seeded #1 and aren't tied with anyone; you don't want to get there until you can win the race). There are six cars, and I was only using cars one, four, and six (which is unfortunate because the third car is my favorite). My plan was to win as many races with the first car as I could in Easy or Medium to upgrade it fully and then skip to car four because car four is the first car with twin machine guns: If you destroy a racer, they do not gain points from the race, even if they place second or third. As soon as I get this car, I jump to the Hard races and try to kill all of the racers to stop them from climbing the ladder. Unfortunately, this isn't too easy, because if you're stuck against all three racers who have the best car (it happened to me twice in my 24-race run; the luck.) you'll be struggling to catch them, let alone kill them. However, buying the better cars isn't really an option because the weapon items you buy for each race (spiked bumpers, mines, etc) jump in price at car five and you're on a budget, so I was basically sitting on the fourth car until it was time to race the boss, then spending all of my money on the best car I could get.
I'd like to play the game on the hardest difficulty, but it's ridiculous getting off the ground because you can't win first with the starting car, and your repairs will cost you all of your winnings. There'd be a lot of resetting if your first couple of races pit you against too many racers with cars two and three. But then again, that's speedrunning. I'm not sure I'm serious enough about speedrunning at the moment to do that, though (That is why I am posting in the Casual forum). My best time in five attempts was
Anyway, it was cool digging out a game I hadn't played in several years and trying to speedrun it. Sucks that my computer doesn't meet the specs, though. When I was building it, I was sure this eight-core AMD would be fast enough, but I had to install this thing called "DOS Box" which I think speeds up my CD-Rom drive to double speed and frees up some disk space so it can copy off all sixteen megs of cinematics? I don't think I even have any megs, they told me gigs were better... maybe I got ripped off. Techno-talk, what does it mean.
As an aside, I've got a question I'll need an answer to if I some day decide to play this seriously enough to submit a run. Would this be considered cheating: Duke Nukem is a playable character, and if you name yourself Duke Nukem you'll have a higher armor rating than is possible to get through upgrades, and it's hidden (you can still buy armor upgrades but they might be useless). It's definitely a necessary strategy to at least select him, even if you have to name him something else to not be cheating, so that there isn't an AI Duke Nukem with an impossible armor rating... Any opinions on this? There are legitimate cheat codes in the game, but this feels different because you have to play against him if you don't take him.
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