 Overview
It's a lazy Saturday afternoon, and little Johnny and his friends are sitting around trying
to think up something to do. "You know what it's time for?" Johnny asks, a
sardonic grin spreading across his face. "Road Rash!" Then Johnny pops his
Swervedriver CD into the hi-fi, cranks up "Last Train to Satansville" and grabs
a chain. Bobby and Suzy don brass knuckles and Ricky snags a Louisville Slugger from the
toy box as the sound of revving dirt bikes roars across the neighborhood. Just some kids
out for a nice afternoon of beating the living hell out of each other, or something more
sinister?
If you have any shred of political correctness in you, you
should NOT buy this game ... if, on the other hand you were the kind of kid who liked
those bubble gum cards with the repulsive caricatures of various monster-truck driving,
motorcycle-revving thugs on them, then this game is the answer to all your violent
adolescent fantasies. Finally, if you are the parent of a young Johnny or Suzy who already
owns a dirt bike and a bad attitude, you may wish to purchase something a little less
inciting than Road Rash. The opening screen for the game even goes so far as to
feature a lengthy disclaimer, similar to what MTV added to episodes of Beavis and
Butt-head following the, ah, excesses of some of their viewers.
This first joint project from Electronic Arts and
Papyrus -- the kings of racing games -- scores some points for audio achievement and
gameplay, but has some noticeable weak points, the adolescent-toned overkill throughout
definitely being one of them.
Hardware Requirements
Well, I've got to start here, because in a word, they're
ridiculous! Yes, even Grandma has a Pentium in her Packard Bell these days, but on my
P-166 Road Rash jerked and hopped and choked in 640x480 full screen mode and the
videos never ran no matter what settings I tried to coax from my nearly brand
new ATI Xpression. Simply inexcusable given the talents of EA and Papyrus ... but
then, EA did release The Need for Speed SE with
enough hardware incompatibilities in the video subsystem that the local Computer City had
a stack of ten returns piled in a box by the time I returned my copy.
Editor's Note: we tried Road Rash on three high-end
Pentium systems, all with name-brand video cards, sound cards, CD-ROMs, etc. but to no
avail. We are looking into these problems with EA and will let you know what we find out.
Installation and Setup
This went fairly smoothly until the game installed the DirectX
drivers; then everything went black ... or rather, pinkish-orange, and my system hung. On
rebooting it popped Windows 95 into safe mode and it took me a good 20 minutes to resolve
all the conflicts and get back to almost normal. And I work with Windows 95 everyday, so
let the less technologically savvy out there install at their own risk.
Controls
Pretty standard fare: joystick or keyboard. My SideWinder did fine, but has to be
recalibrated each time before entering the game or the game options screen has a seizure
and I can just about forget about playing. Keyboard controls are straightforward, but
pretty inadequate for driving a motorcycle. Guess that's why they build 'em with throttles
and not ALT keys...
Gameplay
It's no secret that EA and Papyrus are the forces to be reckoned
with in racing games, and they nearly come through again here -- the racing model is
almost entirely taken from The Need for Speed, with the nice additions of
crossroads, merging traffic, stop lights and hapless pedestrians. Another nice touch is,
of course, the weapons at your disposal. While there are no double-barreled shotguns or
heat-seeking missiles, there are baseball bats, chains and nightsticks. At the outset,
you're unarmed and must kick and punch your way past better-armed opponents, but, you
quickly figure out that if you swing at a fellow thug at the right time, you can grab his
weapon and use it against him -- including the cops and their nightsticks. It makes for
an interesting battle to be traveling at 120 MPH beating on a cop with a chain while he
beats at you with his nightstick, and some other punk is trying to kick your bike out from
under you. Clearly this aspect of the game was given the most attention in the development
cycle as I'll explain below.
Audio
It's odd that EA and company didn't call this game Awesome
Music ... And Oh Yeah, Some Motorcycle Thugs. You've got Soundgarden, Hammerbox,
Swervedriver, Therapy?, Paw, and Monster Magnet combining for 14 hard-edged, excellent
tracks on the CD. $45 for a killer music CD might be a little steep, but this is truly the
best part of this game. The music sets a dark, driving, totally appropriate tone for the
game, but is actually a bit too mature for the ridiculous illustrations and otherwise
childish tones elsewhere in the game.
Video
Bleah! SVGA (640x480) mode is really nice to look at, but
I guess it takes a P-200 or better to get it to run smoothly enough to play decently. In
320x200 mode it runs very nicely, but it looks kind of like an impressionist version of
motorcycle racing at that resolution. Maybe I'll go computer shopping and see what I can
get...
Computer salesperson: "Can I help you?"
Me: "Yeah, how much for the Cray?"
Computer salesperson: "Two million dollars."
Me: "OK. Will it run Road Rash?"
Computer salesperson: "Uh, well, how much memory were you gonna put in
it?"
Me: "Oh, forget it..."
Customization
This is a very cool feature in Road Rash ... unlike the
static settings in The Need for Speed or the overly technical nuances in Indycar and NASCAR,
Road Rash lets you purchase any of a dozen or more bikes with your winnings. It
doesn't let you do much beyond that, but the variety in bike style and performance makes
this an interesting feature and makes each race take on more significance, as you are not
only often learning how to tweak a new bike for maximum performance, you're also trying to
rack up wins to get enough money for that really sleek red machine back in the bike shop.
Enemy AI
Nothing to write home about. In the first few races (each race
course gets longer as you progress through the classes, from road-rat to accomplished thug)
the other racers are easy to beat as long as you stay upright and the cross-traffic
doesn't pick you off. As you progress, though, they get better -- not in knocking you
off your bike so much as they get faster and more able until, like other EA and Papyrus
racers, they can basically beat you just by showing up ... you're up against a computer,
so it can choose how bad or good it is after all. I'd tell you about playing against human
opponents, but I could never even get the modem interface to recognize my modem, much less
dial out, so maybe it's cool. The interface sure isn't.
System Requirements
Windows 95, Pentium 75, 16 MB RAM, 2X CD-ROM drive, 25 MB hard
drive space, SVGA video card capable of "direct draw," keyboard
Recommended: Pentium 120, 4X CD-ROM drive, 16 MB RAM, SVGA
video card with 2 MB RAM, sound card, joystick
Reviewed on: Pentium-166, 40 MB RAM, 6X CD-ROM drive, ATI
Xpression 3D, SoundBlaster AWE32, SideWinder Pro
 Bottom
Line
Road Rash is a great concept carried to an extreme, both
in hardware requirements and juvenile attitude. With the likes of EA and Papyrus behind
this title, it should have had the best of both companies' impressive
qualities; instead
it seems to have carried over the worst mistakes of their past racing titles
-- Papyrus'
blocky graphics and EA's recurring hardware-compatibility difficulties. Still, even with
its drawbacks, I did find myself playing it for quite a few hours and having quite a bit
of fun. Overall I rate it a 72. So much promise ... it should have been so much
better.
Editor's Note
We've received a lot of feedback about this review, mostly from
people who haven't had any problems with the game and wonder why it was only rated a 72.
Most of those who wrote in suggested we get a different video card to test the game on. In
fact, the game was tested on three separate machines, all of which had trouble with the
graphics. We have subsequently tested the game on a machine running a Matrox
Millennium and
it ran fine. The cards that had problems with it were the ATI Xpression 3D, the Diamond
Stealth 64 and the STB Lightwave 128. These cards all perform admirably with almost every
other title we have tested on them, but not with Road Rash. It is fine for our
readership to suggest to us that we test a game on numerous video cards, processors, etc.,
as that is part of our job as reviewers. However, we feel that it is also our duty as
reviewers to warn the buying public about glitches, bugs or installation/gameplay
difficulties that the commercial web sites, publishers and magazines might not bother to
mention, since most people can't afford to run out and buy a new video card just because a
certain software title is picky about the cards it likes.
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