Road Rash was one of my favourite games during the Mega Drive’s heyday – Colin had the first game, which we played in turns for hours at his house, and when the second game came along with split-screen multiplayer it was a day-one purchase. I still have that cartridge, and last played it back in May 2023 – it still works. I have written about the third game on this blog, which felt like a downgrade from the second.
Talking about downgrades, I suppose it’s a wonder that they got Road Rash working on the Master System at all. It barely runs; the framerate is in the single digits, the graphics are messy and disproportioned (the cars in particular look horrendously narrow), the controls are imprecise. It’s almost impossible to avoid oncoming obstacles since they only appear 10 metres up the road. Thankfully, given the difficulty in steering, the opponents tend to leave you alone – I saw no evidence here of certain opponents catching up with me after I’d overtaken them, just so they could lash out at me.
I’m sure that if I’d had only a Master System back in 1992, I’d have been delighted with this. But I didn’t, and now I have access to 32,616,381 different consoles, of which 33% of them have a better version of Road Rash on. One where the main character sprite doesn’t look as if the aspect ratio’s gone wonky.
