Cover art by ar_Tekko.
Our monthly feature highlighting oddball and obscure games for @PIZZAPRANKS‘ Indiepocalypse rides again! This month sees 1988’s Paris-Dakar Rally Special! for Nintendo’s Famicom speeding onto the scene; and presenting us a gauntlet of grueling driving, maze-solving, on-foot platforming, and even encounters against armed combatants — all in the name of “simulating” a real-life rally circuit, which only really deals in one of those four aspects! It’s a true oddity in the driving game genre, made all the stranger by its bearing the branding for an actual race event. Ridiculously difficult and barely coherent as it may be, it’s still a real charmer of a cart in my books, and I happily filled out our allotted space this month covering the details of what makes it so unique:
Sure, maybe aspiring to no less than four different gameplay modes within your car game is a bit of a tall order. But all it should really take is one novel change-up that you can occasionally toss a player’s way: Something that requires changing the speed on a dime, or fundamentally altering the ways in which a player is made to control their vehicle. Make them have to endure some sort of vehicle-based stealth section or something! Force them to step out of the vehicle in order to scavenge for replacement parts whenever they bust a component! Make it so that if you hit a ramp, your car is suddenly able to fly, and players are suddenly immersed within some sort of impromptu flight simulator! The world is your oyster, indie developers, and racing games can be re-imagined to provide a rich new range of features and functions that the games mainstream will otherwise shy away from in their dogged pursuit of “realism.” Until the day that the real-life Dakar Rally starts incorporating firefights and game show-esque obstacle courses, don’t expect the AAA industry to deviate from their comfy little formula.
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