For the racing enthusiasts, there’s a myriad of games out there (1983) that should able to satisfy their speeding needs; whether be Activision’s Enduro featuring a windshield perspective view, driving in the night - ‘Night Driver’ (appropriate name considering), Pitstop with its pit crew forms part of the focal point or the daddy of them all, Pole Position with its awesome graphics and playability to boot. Of course, there’s many, many more however all is missing an element where, let’s put it this way, the player being creative. And when I say creative, the ability to make your own race tracks. Well, there’s a game that can do just that (and race cars). The name is John Anderson’s Rally Speedway. Whilst it plays as an arcade type of game, and not to be taken seriously, the ability to create tracks is certainly an illustrious feature to have and simple to use.
The name John Anderson I believe is the programmer as I originally thought it was the NASCAR driver. The manual does not explain who this fellow is however I’m pretty certain it’s the programmer, as, for example, Bill Budge’s Pinball Construction Set as back in those days, it’s pretty rare that the programmer’s name appears anywhere (thanks to Atari). Nevertheless, once booted up, you will be greeted with a silent splash screen and what appears to be a myriad of choices. All colourful in display, it seems to be the norm for publisher Adventure International (take a look at their previous games Preppie I and II).
The choices are pretty stock standard for this genre save for a few being the type of roads (dry, wet or icy), acceleration (slow, medium or fast) and four choices of top speed. Also, this game can be played with either one or two players and has a neat feature that you can play in ‘Real Life’ or ‘Only in a Computer’ – basically means ‘anything goes’ (real life) or ‘god mode’ (only in a computer) where you cannot damage the car period. Out of the box only comes with two tracks however this is where the construction set kicks in (more on that later).
The race track is viewed from a top down perspective and there’s two sets of control movements – the first is from the car’s perspective and the second, from the joystick’s perspective. I prefer from the car’s perspective however I guess it’s a matter of choice (for which is a good thing). Depending upon what you have selected will dictate the car’s speed, acceleration and so on. My personal favourite is medium acceleration, eighty miles / hour top speed on icy roads and in real life. Icy roads is the bomb as you can perform some mean drifts on the bends and because I have medium acceleration, it compensates the loss of speed when turning.
Also, another feature is that, to memory, only a few games have is the ability to go off road – that is you are not confined to the track itself. Going off road will slow your car down considerably and unfortunately you can also cheat by doing a 360 at the starting block as the game will not recognise what you have done, thus win the game in a blink of an eye. Under two player mode, both cars will be displayed and there’s no feature to drive the opponent car off screen. What the game does instead is impose a penalty of ten seconds added to the slower car. Also by crashing your car imposes a five second added penalty.
Because the game only comes with two tracks, its main selling point is the ‘Trax-Construct Feature’. This feature enables the player to create virtually unlimited number of tracks that can be saved on either disks or cassettes. Very simple to use as it does not require any programming knowledge. It’s a simple click on the desired item then click to drop it on the map. So in essence you can recreate any favourite track you like.
Visually it’s fine to look at however it certainly looks like Intellivision’s ‘Auto Racing’ game back in 1979, four years ago. It goes to show that Intellivision’s graphics capabilities was insane and far exceeds any video consoles at the time. Nice colours and visuals, it even has houses with a pool. Also, there’s a neat graphical feature where, when you crash the car, sometimes the driver catches on fire and does a barrel roll to put it out, only to give a thumb up at the end indicating all is good. The sound quality is virtually nothing to speak off. Yes, you have the sound of your car accelerating however it’s very weak. The crash is a simple ‘boom’ and you have the occasional screeching noise. This is weird considering Adventure International’s other game, Preppie II has a bucket load of sounds and beautiful music to match.
John Anderson’s Rally Speedway is an average product at best. It really feels like the game was developed in a short space of time to capitalise the ‘construction’ fever. The racing elements is average at best however it does have a couple more features like selecting the road type before racing. Even the graphics looks like it was pulled off from Intellivision’s 1979 game ‘Auto Racing’. Now add very little sound quality to speak off and you have a sub-par software. So my only recommendation is, if you like creating your own tracks and don’t mind the arcade-like controls, then you cannot go wrong with this.