OutRun left a trail behind it. How could it not? In arcades and WH Smith computer game sections, you couldn’t move for games where you drove a sports car off into the distance. And if the computers they were for didn’t have the same capability for colour and speed, why should that get in the way? After all, the only reason the Atari ST version of OutRun we covered went to #1 was because it was released separately from the 8-bit ones which had already collectively made it to the top.
Crazy Cars is a game by Titus Interactive, a French company whose best known game is a contest between this one and Superman 64. The latter is well known for being supremely, outstandingly bad. Crazy Cars can’t claim such an accolade. Rather, it is a game which ruthlessly strips down a concept to basic principles, and makes a decent go of it even on the Spectrum as a result.
You drive against the clock. There are a sparing handful of other cars. Posts flash by at the roadside in a moderately effective alternative to the standard striped landscape when it comes to showing speed. In a well-calculated bit of novelty, your car reacts to collisions and sudden elevation changes with enormous leaps into the air that might reasonably be described as crazy. That’s it.
The road itself is monochrome, the view enlivened only by those posts and some rather funky architecture on the horizon, some of which later on puts me in mind of the just-about-completed Grande Arche de la Défense. The lack of any other detail coupled with the way that the road swings relentlessly from side to side give Crazy Cars no sense of being in a real place at all. It doesn’t have that or style to carry it. It’s just about a pure gameplay challenge, a focus on meeting demand after demand, a callback to an older kind of arcade experience.
Playing it now, I don’t find it especially compelling. But then, even back when I was a Commodore 64 player I already played the conversion of OutRun. What Crazy Cars does is old old news to me, and I have a well-established leaning towards games that do something with narrative and place. If it wasn’t for that, if I think about Crazy Cars being someone’s first or second experience of this kind of game, it could be different. If I think about them reaching the twitch-reacting focus state it calls for, enjoying the tease of the game over message appearing before time runs out and then being pushed away, I can see how Crazy Cars found its own successful lane.
