Here we go ‘round the race driving track so early in the morning.

One of the few songs in the game is here!

To Beat: Finish 8 Races
To Complete: Win the Championship
What I Did: Completed the game
Played: 8/16/20 – 9/27/20
Difficulty: 9/10
My Difficulty: 9/10
My Video: Days of Thunder Longplay

I can’t say if this is true of all NES racing games, but the ones I have played and beaten so far have been awfully hard.  Bill Elliott’s NASCAR Challenge was surprisingly puzzle-like in configuring the car properly for top speed, and it also had a low threshold for failure that made the game very challenging.  Nigel Mansell’s World Championship Racing had more arcade style racing but required near perfection to post top times and win races.  That game also had randomness in the pit stops that often made good finishes next to impossible.  Days of Thunder has a pretty strong claim for being the hardest of these three games and was very close to earning a surprise 10/10 difficulty rating.  Read on to discover why this game is so hard and I had to do to clear it.

Days of Thunder was a Summer 1990 racing film.  It stars Tom Cruise, was directed by Tony Scott, and produced by both Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer.  Production on the film seemed troubled with many reported arguments between the director and producers on how certain scenes were shot.  As a result, the film went way over budget, coming it at around $55 million.  Despite all the issue involved, the movie ended up a financial success, grossing over $150 million worldwide, plus tens of millions more in rentals.  The film was received by mixed reviews critically.

Days of Thunder was adapted into a couple of video games.  The initial version was a PC release in 1990, developed by Argonaut Software and published by Mindscape.  This version was ported to many other computers, as well as the NES.  The NES version of Days of Thunder was released in October 1990.  This port was also published by Mindscape but was developed by Beam Software.  PAL versions were released in April 1991.  A Game Boy version also followed in 1992.  The 2nd Days of Thunder game was a PS3 and Xbox 360 release in 2011 for the 20th anniversary of the film.  This game had very few critical reviews, but of those it had it was received poorly.

You can pull right up to the front of the place.

The story of this game follows in line fairly well with the source material.  You play the role of Cole Trickle, a rookie driver who has never driven in stock car racing before.  Even still, he has his eyes on winning and winning big.  To win the championship, he will need to win many races including beating his rivals Rowdy Burns and Russ Wheeler, both characters from the film.  This game features an eight-race series with a leaderboard and you will need to perform very well if you expect to win.

The racing controls are very straightforward.  All races in this game are run on circular tracks driving counter-clockwise around the track.  You use the A button to accelerate and the B button to brake.  After accelerating you can let go of the A button and maintain speed without pressing anything.  Tap the B button to brake.  Once you initiate the brake, you will continue to slow down until you press A again.  Naturally, you will use Left and Right to turn.  The Select button pauses the game.  

While racing in this game takes place from behind the car, you still see different indicators about the car along the edges of the screen.  The top left shows your fuel gauge, nice and big.  The top right side shows which lap you are on, as well as either timings for qualifying or your position in the current race.  The two round meters are your speedometer and tachometer respectively.  The speedometer indicates how fast you are going, while the tachometer shows how many RPMs your engine is running.  You may notice during driving that your acceleration and braking most directly affect your tachometer.  The lower right shows a top down image of your car, with color coded damage and wear indicators.  You can see the condition of your tires, engine, and fuel tank.  Green is good, yellow means some wear, purple means significant wear, and red is extreme wear.  Condition is affected both by normal driving over time, as well as collisions with other drivers or the sides of the tracks.  Your driving performance is reduced once components begin to wear.

Before competing in each race, you must run qualifying laps first.  The first thing you’ll see is a top down overview of the racetrack along with a text scrawl at the bottom of the screen.  Move past this screen and you go directly into the action.  Each course requires you to drive four qualifying laps first.  The bottom text as the laps begin show you the target time you are trying to beat in any one lap of the four.  On the right side you will see your current lap timer as well as your best completed lap, which starts off at 0.  It turns out the lap you want to focus on the most is the second lap because the first lap begins with you not at top speed, and by the third lap you will start having tire wear which reduces your performance just enough to make a difference.  Your best lap determines where you begin the race.  Beat the target time to start in pole position, tie the target time to start second, and then you lose a place for every tenth of a second slower than that.  At worst, you’ll start the race in eighth place.

Just you and the track. Go fast!

Now that qualifying is finished, it’s time to race.  You will first see the same top down view as before, but also you see your starting position.  If you pay attention to the text on this screen, it will tell you how many laps the race is, which is very important to know.  Press Start to immediately begin the race.  Now the real fun begins as you try to handle the turns, weave around other drivers, and avoid collisions to keep your car in tip-top shape.  You earn points for completing each race that are reflected on the overall leaderboard.  The scores from 1st through 8th place are 175, 170, 165, 160, 155, 150, 146, and 142.  No matter how many cars are in the race, it seems you cannot do worse than 8th place if you finish the race.  If you are unable to finish the race, you get no points, which is disastrous.  There is also a 5 point bonus for leading any individual lap, as well as another 5 point bonus to the driver who led the most laps in the race.  The leaderboard is cumulative over all races.

Racing is tough, and sometimes you don’t drive all that well and finish poorly.  Eventually, your team and sponsors have had enough of bad driving and demand that you run additional time trials to prove your mettle.  If this happens, after a race you will receive a telegram expressing disappointment along with a goal time they want you to meet.  This part functions the same as qualifying, only the goal time is an average of your laps, not just the best lap.  If you average ahead of the goal time, they allow you to continue racing, but if you fail, it is Game Over and you must restart from the beginning.  This sequence can happen up to three times in the game with stricter goal times each time.  Poor enough racing to trigger this for a fourth time is automatic Game Over as well, though I never saw this scenario.

A unique, and frustrating feature of this game are what happens in the pit stops.  Pit lane appears on the left side just before the lap finishes.  You must slow down and drive left into pit lane.  Go too fast and you will drive right through, wasting time and putting you at risk if you are in a dire situation with the car.  In the pits, you can refuel, replace your tires, and repair your engine, but you must do so manually.  Upon entering, fresh tires and jacks are in position, as well as your crew members.  There are three roving crew members that handle tires, one dedicated refueler, and one dedicated engine mechanic.  One at a time you control the pit crew members, putting them into place and performing actions.  Press the B button to cycle between the pit crew members.  You control the flashing person directly with the D-pad.  Press the A button to perform a context-specific action.

Pit stop management can be super tedious.

Juggling all the pit crew members around to perform the actions you need while under the clock can absolutely make or break your race, so you need to have a plan and execute quickly.  Replacing the tires is the most complicated, time consuming, and necessary procedure.  First off, you need a person in front of the jack, then press A to lift up that side of the car.  Next, switch to another roving member, put them in front of the old tire, and press A to start replacing it.  You will do the same thing with the other tire while this is taking place.  The tire replacement happens completely without any further interaction, and the pit crew member automatically backs away when finished.  To complete this, you need the center person to unjack the car and set it back down.  Now if you need to replace the right side tires, which you most likely will do, you need to run those same members one at a time around the car to the opposite side and perform the same procedure as above.  The positioning in front of the jack and tires is very precise and they won’t do the work unless they are just in the right spot.  Crew members can also get stuck on the sides of the car while running around, adding to the frustration.  Refueling is more simple, just move the refueler to the right and press A to start fueling.  However, the car must be lowered on that side.  Similarly, move the mechanic to the left to start fixing the engine, however in this case the car must be raised on the right side to perform the repairs.  You will often want to do everything in the pits, and there is a flow to it once you do it enough.  You have to do it fast as the race keeps happening and you lose position the longer you spend in the pits.  The most effective pit stops with all repairs take between 18-22 seconds, often it ends up longer than that due to the controls.

Something special happens at the end of the game that lines up well with the events of the movie.  Before the final race, you receive a telegram that says Rowdy, the leaderboard champion, has suffered some serious injuries and cannot compete in the final race.  You have been asked to drive his car in his stead, presumably to allow him to remain sponsored or something like that.  For this final race, you will be driving his Mello Yello car.  This helps a lot because he won’t receive any points for the race, allowing you to come from behind and become the champion if you are also able to fend off Russ.  This also means for the duration of the game you only need to worry about maintaining second place overall.

Feels good to pull out in front!

Beating this game is one of those nebulous situations.  Just completing all the races is difficult enough, with the threat of getting kicked out for driving too poorly looming all the time.  But with a little practice, you can finish all the races and get an ending screen.  It turns out it is the same ending screen you get if you win the championship.  Does that make it a bad ending or a normal ending?  I suppose that is up for debate, though it is clear in my mind.  Considering it is a racing game, and that most of the other racers I’ve played on the NES require winning the title, that’s what I settled on here as well.  It doesn’t feel right to simply finish without being the best, plus there is a congratulations sequence for getting first place, an actual good ending.  Making this difficult is that this game has no continues or passwords whatsoever.  It is only 8 races, but there is little room for error over a full season.

This was my first time playing Days of Thunder.  I know I sound like a broken record at this point, but I don’t care for racing games at all, and also I never saw this movie.  This is one of those cheap, filler NES games that is not super common but easy to come across eventually in a game lot, for instance.  The one thing I did remember about my time from testing my cart was that the track animation as you are driving looks really nice.  That was my only memory of this game.

This game works against the player in several ways.  The driving mechanics seem straightforward enough.  You don’t have to hold A the entire time and slowing down in the curves is a matter of tapping B to slow down a bit and tapping A to maintain speed.  If you do it correctly, by holding left throughout the turn and starting low, you should move slightly toward the outside and finish the curve near the edge without touching the outside wall.  This is the standard technique that you will do over and over.  Navigating around the cars while doing this isn’t too bad, until you get to Rowdy in 1st and Russ in 2nd.  Their AI is different than all the other drivers.  Russ in particular is really a jerk as he always moves to get in front of you.  Rowdy tries to do the same but always holds the line in the curves, giving you a little more room to get around him.  There isn’t much room to squeak by them, so you need to get in close and sort of slingshot around them without touching them.  Any kind of bumping will add extra wear to your tires, and what’s worse is that if your fuel tank or engine gets degraded at all, there’s really nothing you can do to advance until you pit.  Pitting pretty much always loses you position even if you are on top of your game.  And that’s another thing, planning out when you should pit is also important.  Usually you will need to pit twice per race and you need to space them out as much as possible so as to keep in good running shape while also properly managing fuel usage.  Running out of fuel is a lost race and an automatic reset if you are set on winning the title.

It can feel hopeless attempting to pass your rivals.

My trajectory through this game to completion was about what you might expect.  I didn’t get very far for the first couple nights, struggling through pit stops and ending with poor results.  You can get decently far into the game even when you drive badly; the third time trial is really tough without proper seasoning but it takes several races to trigger that.  Within a few days I was able to finish 3rd in a lot of the races, enough to get through the game 2nd overall due to Rowdy dropping out.  This is where I stalled out for a long time.  I was always losing ground in the turns but couldn’t get the hang of taking them properly.  I spent one entire night grinding the first track just to see what kind of edge I could find, ultimately finding nothing.  After 10 hours total and over half of that with no progress, I decided to research proper strategies, and the answer was pretty simple.  I needed to start braking before the turn, not into the turn.  You don’t need to brake that much, just a little bit slower going into the turn and I took the whole thing at a higher speed than I was before.  Before I could do turns with the tachometer pointed between 3 and 4, now I could have it pointed at the 5 and still handle the turns perfectly.  This was the edge I needed.  Now I can get right behind the lead car just before the turn starts, and then whip around the outside and get in front.  On my winning attempt, I was able to win both of the first two races, setting the pace.  I didn’t do nearly as well from then on, even a 5th place finish in there, but by the end I edged out Russ by only five points on the board.  It was a hard fought victory for sure.

In early to mid-2020, the Video Game History Foundation acquired development materials from the late Chris Oberth, such as old computers and floppy disks.  Among these items was the source code for a completely different NES version of Days of Thunder that had never saw that light of day.  Thanks to the tireless efforts of these video game preservationists, the source code was compiled, and they managed to create a working build of this long lost title.  You can watch a gameplay video right here, the source code has been made public, and you can find a downloadable ROM floating around the Internet.  This version of the game features qualifying laps in the first-person perspective, with races taking place in a side view.  The pit stop mechanics are also different but do carry over the “do it yourself” feel from the released version.  I am so glad that things like this are still being found today.

While it’s no surprise that I was less than thrilled about playing this game, I can definitely respect the work that went into making it.  The graphics in this game are well done.  The way the track redraws as you approach curves really gives the game a sense of depth, done in a different way than other racers.  The music, like many racing games, is all sound effects during the races, but the smaller tunes in between parts sound good.  The game controls well during the actual racing and the driving feels right.  The controls during the pit stops are both finicky and challenging, not in a good way.  This is what sets this game apart, but also what leads to frustration and guaranteed time loss no matter how efficient you are.  That part could have been improved for certain.  Having no password or retry system really pushes the difficulty near the max.  As far as movie adaptations goes, this one is just fine.  I think it has some good qualities as a racing game.  I am happy this one is in my rearview mirror.

#164 – Days of Thunder

Let Nigel guide you through this racing season.

World Championship Challenge may be a better name.

To Beat: Win the Championship
Played: 6/1/20 – 6/13/20
Difficulty: 8/10
My Difficulty: 8/10
My Video: Nigel Mansell’s World Championship Racing Longplay

In a perfect world, I would be able to crank out these reviews roughly in line with when I beat the game.  It turns out I enjoy playing the games more than writing about them, so naturally I’ve fallen behind.  For this game, it may work to my benefit to be behind.  This is the second racing game I have beaten for this project, but between beating the game and writing this review I have already beaten a third racing game.  My struggles with all three games have indicated that I am not good at racing games.  Because of that, in part, I also do not like them very much.  I don’t have to like the game to recognize that this is a solid racing game.

Nigel Mansell had a 15-year career in Formula One racing, active from 1980 through 1995.  His early career started out slow but when he joined the Williams racing team in 1985 he became a real contender for the World Championship.  He finished second overall in both 1986 and 1987 and placed Top 10 for the next several years. After a brief foray with the Ferrari team in 1989 and 1990, he went back to Williams in 1991.  That year he placed second for the third time in his career.  Finally, in 1992, he had his best year and won the World Championship.  Due to some disagreements with his team, he switched over to the CART series for the 1993 season, where he won that as well.  That made him both Formula One and CART champions at the same time, the only racer to ever accomplish this feat.  He returned to Formula One for 1994 and 1995, retiring for good after the 1995 season.

Nigel Mansell’s World Championship Racing was first released on the Amiga in 1992.  It was developed and published by Gremlin Graphics.  The company changed names to Gremlin Interactive Limited in 1994 and was acquired by Infogrames in 1999 before closing down in 2003.  The game was widely ported to other home computers and game consoles mostly in 1993, including the NES, SNES, Game Boy, and Sega Genesis.  The NES version was released in October 1993, developed by Gremlin Graphics and published by Gametek.  The game was also released in Europe in 1993, slightly retitled to Nigel Mansell’s World Championship and published by Gremlin.

Ready. Set. Go!

Nigel Mansell’s World Championship Racing is a Formula One simulation game.  You have the option to run single races, but the meat of the game is the full season mode.  This is a 16-race season.  Depending on your placement at the end of each race, you are awarded points that are cumulative throughout the season.  To beat the game, you must complete the season as the points leader.

At the title screen, where the game is named Nigel Mansell’s World Championship Challenge for some reason, press Start to advance to name entry.  The game tells you on screen the controls for entering your name, which is nice!   You can enter your name up to 13 characters, then there’s a forced space, and then the final 3 characters for your country.  One thing to note here is that the character entry is extremely touchy.  You can scroll through characters quickly but you have to tap briefly to advance one at a time.  After entering your name, you go to the main menu.  Here you can choose to run a single race or the full season mode, as well as a training mode called “Improve with Mansell.”  You can also toggle the music on and off.

The driving is very straightforward.  The game takes place from behind the wheel.  Use the D-pad Left and Right to steer the car.  For manual transmission, press Up or Down to shift gears.  There are six gears in this engine.  Press and hold A to accelerate, and press B to hit the brakes.  The bottom of the screen shows all the information you need.  On the bottom left, you see the current lap timer as well as how far ahead or how far behind you are in time from first place.  The middle contains the track map as well as your current position ranking and current lap.  The bottom right shows your speedometer and gear setting, as well as a meter denoting the quality of your tires.

Set up your car for peak performance.

The setup of your car is important to how well it will perform during the race.  You can set the transmission, tires, and the angle of the wing on the back of the car.  First up is manual vs automatic transmission.  Manual transmission translates to faster driving because you can more optimally shift gears, but it requires more skill to pull off.  The tire choice determines how they wear out and the amount of grip they have.  Hard tires wear slower, but they have less grip making it harder to turn.  Wet tires are very useful during rainy weather conditions.  With a wet track, the wet tires wear out same as the hard tires and handle turns well.  In dry conditions, the wet tires wear out the fastest and handle the poorest.  For the wings, the angle determines the acceleration and handling of the car.  A low angle of 10% gives the car the best acceleration but poorest cornering.  The angle of 30% is the opposite: The acceleration is degraded but the cornering is the best.  You can also choose in the middle at 20%.

The single race option is good for trying out the game.  You begin with the Track Select screen.  Each track is represented by the flag of the country it is located, and when you hover over the flag you can see the map of the track below.  Choose a track to go to course information.  You’ll see the name of the course and the map, as well as the distance, fastest lap, weather conditions, and number of laps.  After this screen, you’ll have a submenu.  Setup lets you configure your car for the race.  Now you can either qualify for the race or jump straight into the race.  When qualifying, you run a single lap of the course, and the ranking of times from fastest to slowest among the 12 total racers determines everyone’s starting position for the race.  If you go directly to the race without qualifying, you always begin at the very end of the starting lineup.  After the race, you’ll see how you placed, followed by the full leaderboard of all 12 racers.

May the pits be ever in your favor.

The Improve with Mansell mode functions similarly to setting up a single race.  First you go to track selection, then the circuit information screen.  Next you go straight to the setup screen for customizing your car.  Now you are ready to drive.  You will run the full number of laps with Nigel’s floating head in the upper right the entire time, with no other drivers on the track.  There is a race line arrow that shows you generally how you should align yourself throughout this race.  Nigel will give you tips as you drive, from basic stuff like staying on the track and staying in the racing line, to important information like watching your tires so you remember to make a pit stop.  When you finish the laps, you go back to the main menu.  The purpose of this mode is not to go fast, but to drive accurately.  While it is helpful to learn the basics, you will need to learn how to handle the courses at or near top speed to win races.

The main mode in the game is the full season mode.  Since this is a long mode, there are passwords, which are 14 characters long consisting up all consonants, digits, and the period.  The entry screen also has the same finicky character selection as name entry, making passwords frustrating to input.  Upon either continuing a game or starting a new one, the rest of the mode functions the same as a standard race.  You get course information, you can configure your car, and you can optionally run a qualifying lap before starting the race.  You will run all 16 races one at a time until a champion is crowned.

This was my first time playing Nigel Mansell’s Championship Racing.  This is an uncommon, late release, however I’ve been able to find this one locally several times.  My local store had it at one point for pretty cheap, either $5 or $10, and that’s where I got mine.  I know I bought some locally and at least one more on eBay in a lot.  Loose carts of the game sell for $15 or so.  I think my local store sells it for $20 now.

The wide cars can be difficult to pass.

It’s a small sample size so far, but I have learned that racing games such as this one demand a high level of skill to compete against the computer.  Furthermore, this game is biased against you in some unexpected ways.  Take qualifying as an example.  It is common to make a mistake or two in qualifying and end up in last place by many seconds.  To make this worse, you have to navigate around other cars during your lap.  Qualifying is supposed to be just you and the track, nothing else.  When you bump into a car from behind, your car always drops a gear, which is frustrating when driving manual.  That also drives home the importance of figuring out how to qualify on top in as many races as possible.  Other racers are large on the screen, easy to bump into, and usually tricky to pass.  Probably the biggest hurdle in the game is that the other racers never take a pit stop, where you will always have to take one in the middle of the race.  Moreover, the pit stops take anywhere from 5 to 9 seconds, and it is random.  At least you can take as much time as you want to choose your new tires.  This is not an easy game to beat.

Figuring out the car setup was very important.  I went with manual transmission all the way.  I learned that even though the soft tires wear more quickly, you can still run every race with only one required pit stop.  The better handling of the soft tires was the clear winner.  Of course, use the wet tires if it is raining, obvious best choice there.  For the angle I eventually settled on 20 degrees.  Early on in the playthrough I varied a lot, winning some races with hard tires and 10 degrees, and others with soft tires and 30 degrees.

The best way to win races is to get yourself into first place as early as possible.  With no one in front of me, it was much easier to build up a good lead.  Usually this means qualifying in first place, but sometimes I settled for lower than that, especially on difficult tracks.  Many times I qualified lower but worked my way to first before pitting.  You really want to build up a much of a lead as possible since you will lose time during your mandatory pit stop.  You do need to get lucky to get a short pit time since it is random.  It’s very frustrating to get several seconds ahead, then be behind and unable to catch up because you got stuck with a 9 second pit stop.  But that’s the way it goes.

Sweet victory!

My strategy on racing games with a leaderboard is that I always want to be in first place at every point in the season.  In this playthrough, I mostly accomplished that.  I struggled learning the first track and settled for a second place finish after trying over and over.  Then I won the next two races and earned an 8-point lead.  I maintained the lead the rest of the way.  This was the point in the game that I noticed that the other top racers tend to share the leaderboard points.  There is no clear rival in this game, and any racer can win one race and end up fifth or sixth the next race.  The placements tend to be random.  Sometimes this meant I could place lower than I wanted and still feel comfortable proceeding because I only lost a point or two on the leaderboard between me and second place overall.  Over the 16 races my lead varied quite a lot.  I got down to a 4-point lead, then later built up a 20-point lead, and finally finished 5 points ahead.

There’s one final point I want to make.  My longplay video for this game is just stitched together with the final attempts at each race before moving on.  I spent nearly 11 hours of attempts to come up with the 2.5 hour longplay.  Very few times did I place well enough in consecutive attempts.  I absolutely abused the password system, and I expect that most people that play through this game will do the same.  There’s no sense in accepting bad results when you can just input the previous password and try again.  I set up the video to make it look like I did the whole game single segment, but I assure you that I did not.

Nigel Mansell’s World Champion Racing is a pretty good racer.  This is a good looking game.  The cars are well detailed, the scrolling is smooth, and there are some neat effects such as hills when driving and the accurate rear view mirrors from inside your car.  The tunes that play in the menus and leaderboards are pleasing to the ears.  It doesn’t bother me that there are only car noises and sound effects during gameplay.  The controls during driving work great, and they are annoying and tedious when inputting names and passwords.  The racing itself is well done with good track variety.  The races don’t overstay their welcome at 4-6 laps each.  The game is a little long, but not too bad.  The game does things that are unfair, but it is structured in a way where you can mitigate that.  I still don’t enjoy racing games, but I can’t deny that this one is quality.

#159 – Nigel Mansell’s World Championship Racing

The thrills and heartbreak of NASCAR, now on your NES!

Featuring one of the few songs in the entire game!

To Beat: Win the Championship Season
Played: 4/17/18 – 4/23/18
Difficulty: 9/10
My Difficulty: 9/10
My Video: Bill Elliott’s NASCAR Challenge Final Races

Let me be clear of something right away. I don’t like racing, I don’t like NASCAR, and I don’t like racing video games. I can understand the appeal of the sport, I suppose, but it’s just not for me. I only wanted to play a few of the more popular NES racers, some of the more arcade style ones like Rad Racer and R.C. Pro-Am. Bill Elliott’s NASCAR Challenge was nowhere in my radar. Sure enough, this is a game that tries to emulate real racing with the ability to customize cars. That’s the kind of complexity that scares me a little bit. Though I did have some struggles with the game, I was able to figure it out enough to share my findings with you today.

NASCAR stands for the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing. It was founded by Bill France Sr. in 1948 in Daytona Beach, FL. The company headquarters is still located there today. NASCAR as most people know it these days arose from the Strictly Stock Division of racing, which was one of the three initial divisions created for this form of auto racing. Today, NASCAR sanctions over 1500 races every year, mostly across the US and Canada.

Bill Elliott’s NASCAR Challenge was developed by Distinctive Software and published by Konami. The original release was on MS-DOS in 1990, with NES, Amiga, and Macintosh versions appearing in 1991. While not the first game featuring stock car racing, it is believed to be the first game with the NASCAR license. The NES version of the game was released in December 1991 and only appeared in North America.

It’s not fun watching Bill Elliott win all the time.

In this game you compete in several NASCAR races against other drivers, including Bill Elliott. He was a 1988 Winston Cup champion and a very popular racer during his time in NASCAR. He is the best racer in the game and the one you want to beat if you hope to finish this game. Each race consists of sixteen drivers and there are four tracks to choose from. Two courses, Daytona and Talledega, are high-banked ovals, and the other two, Sears Point and Watkins Glen, are road course with various twists and turns. There are several options to play the game, but to beat the game you want to compete in the Championship Season. This consists of eight total races so each track appears twice. You and the other racers earn points based on the overall standings after races are finished. If you are in first place in the standings after the season, you win the game.

The driving in this game takes places in first-person view from inside the car. The controls are straightforward. Use Left and Right on the D-pad to steer the car. The A button hits the gas to accelerate, and the B button brakes. Release the A button and press Up to upshift the car and Down to downshift the car when driving with manual transmission. That’s all you need to know!

There’s a lot of information inside the car. The top of the screen displays how many laps are remaining and which position you are in the race. You also have a rear-view mirror to see anyone coming up behind you. The bottom of the screen has even more information. To the left of the steering wheel is your speedometer, and through the wheel is the tachometer to see your RPMs, or revolutions per minute. The steering wheel is static but has a little knob on it that moves as you drive so you can more accurately see how you are steering. The three gauges in a row on the right are for oil pressure, temperature, and fuel. Below them are the damage light and the fuel warning light. The far right displays a flag indicating the current race conditions, and under that is the gearbox and gearshift. It might seem overwhelming but it’s really not.

There are many options for setting up the game listed out on the main select screen. The first option is to choose your track, and you go to a screen that shows a map of each course along with the name. Use the D-pad to select a track or choose the Championship Season if you want to play a full game. Press the A button to decide, and then you can choose how many miles you want to run. You can choose from 10 all the way up to the full 500 miles. The default is 20 miles, and that’s what I went with. On the next screen you can choose which car you want. Your choices are a Pontiac Grand Prix, a Ford Thunderbird, or a Chevrolet Lumina. Each one handles a bit differently, but it’s not clear what the differences are just from looking.

So many options it’s hard to find the main game.

The NASCAR license screen lets you enter your name for the standings. Use the D-pad to choose a letter and press A to enter it. There are arrows at the bottom to reposition the cursor, and the RUB option deletes the highlighted character. Select the End option when you are finished. You can also press Select to put the cursor to the box below to enter your password. This applies to the Championship Season only and is a huge, 35-character password. It’s a little longer and a little less complicated than The Guardian Legend passwords.

Auto-qualify can be set to either Yes or No. This determines if you run qualifying laps before the race to determine your pole position. If you choose No, before you start the race you will run two laps on the track yourself. Then your time is compared with the other racers. Your rank here determines both your starting position for the race and which pit area you will use for pit stops. If you choose Yes, then this process is done for you and you are given a randomly selected position. Unfortunately, this position is always near the back of the pack, but it saves you time if you want to get into a race quickly.

The skill level can be set to either Novice, Rookie, or Pro. In the Novice level, the opponents drive slower and you cannot crash. This is perfect for practicing courses under normal racing conditions. In both Rookie and Pro levels, you can crash. The Pro level racers go all out compared to the Rookie level drivers. The bad part is that when you run the Championship Season, you are locked into the Pro level no matter what.

Once you have made all your selections to this point, it is time to race. Well, almost. The final two options are Race and Practice. The Race option is for running an actual race, either a single course or the Championship Season. First you see the track you have chosen. Then you will see the standings if you are in the Championship Season. Next you will fine tune very specific settings for your car, and you can watch the animation of the crew making changes to your vehicle if you want. Finally, it’s time to drive either in the actual race or qualifying if you haven’t done that already.

Watching the mechanic work!

Practice mode puts you in special situations. You get another screen and can choose from Drafting, Passing, Following a Line, or Pitting. Choose your option and then you can read some advice from Bill Elliott himself. Then you can tune your car and go right to practicing. Some of these techniques are really valuable to learn.

Drafting is an important technique you will want to learn. This happens when you are following behind a car closely. The lead car moves so fast it creates a partial vacuum behind it, so following a car gives you less air resistance and you can go faster. The idea is you can let off the gas a little bit while still maintaining the speed to stay behind the lead car. This allows you the opportunity to sling shot by hitting the gas and using the additional acceleration you saved by drafting to pass the lead car. Trying to sling shot at the wrong time can leave you out of position to draft the car if you are unable to pass them during the move.

Another important technique is holding a line. The idea is that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, so you go faster along the track if you can hold a line versus moving around along the track. On an oval course, the best line is the inside track during the turns and the outside track during the straightaways. For the road courses, it’s more important to get through curves as quickly as possible.

Fine tuning your vehicle is the most important process for racing in this game. The manual covers all this information really well. The first two options on the left are the most straightforward. You can choose either a manual or automatic transmission, and also either the racing engine or qualifying engine. The automatic transmission means you don’t have to shift gears while driving, however this engine will always fall short of peak performance. You must learn to drive manual to have a shot at beating the game. The qualifying engine is designed to give you the best performance for qualifying, but it is prone to failure if you are running a long race.

Ah, the open track, no one in sight! Oh it’s just qualifying…

The other three options on the right are more detailed. The first of these is the spoiler angle. You can set it anywhere between 20 and 70 degrees. When the angle is higher, this puts more force down on the car. That helps you hold a line better and not slide out so much during turns. Lower spoiler angles help the car run a bit faster at the expensive of less handling.

The gear ratio can be set at predefined values between 2.00 and 4.57. This determines how many RPMs you run the engine. If you run at too many RPMs for too long, your engine with blow up and you will be knocked out of the race. Lower gear ratios run at higher RPMs, which means you get better acceleration but have to shift more often. Higher ratios give you less acceleration and may prevent you from running at optimal speed. This is the setting you really want to tinker with the most to get the best top speed out of your car.

The last option is tire stagger. This is the size difference between the inside and outside tires. This is most important on the oval tracks with the high-banked curves. A higher tire stagger helps you hold a line within a curve better, which in turns helps you go a bit faster. If you are pointing too much toward the inside of a curve, you might want to increase stagger. If you are sliding toward the outside wall too much, you might want to decrease stagger.

During a race you might need to make a pit stop to repair damage, adjust settings mid race, or refuel. There are red arrows along a portion of the track that point to the pit lane. Cross the red-dotted line and drive to the end of it to enter the pits. The view will change to a top-down view, and here you always drive automatic to help make this easier. You need to remember which position you started in so that you can stop at the same numbered pit area, and you want to come to a complete stop. If you go too far, you have to make another lap and try again.

Don’t forget to make an accurate pit stop.

On the pit stop screen, you have to work quickly. You see your position and stopwatch for time spent in the pits. There are a bunch of meters showing how different components are doing, and you see your spoiler angle and tire stagger at the bottom. You can tell your pit crew to focus on any of these items by selecting one with the controller. The top meter is fuel, followed by left side tires, right side tires, all tires, and general damage. Pick an option to perform repairs by replacing tires, fixing damage, or refueling. All repair or replacement options include refueling. Replacing tires or repairing damage take the longest. It’s up to you to decide what you want to fix to get better handling. The race is still going on in the meanwhile, so the less time you spend in the pits, the better your position.

As you could probably guess, this was my first time playing Bill Elliott’s NASCAR Challenge. I don’t remember where I got the cart, probably in one of my random eBay lots. It costs around $5 or a little more, so it’s not expensive. I bet there are more copies of this game floating around because it’s a Konami published title and that keeps the price down. In my experience, it’s a game I don’t see around much even though it’s readily available online. My collection copy is the only copy I’ve owned.

It really helps to read the manual for the game before playing it. There are hints for how you might customize your car to get the best performance. Unfortunately, it doesn’t tell you everything. First you have to select a car, and then the tweaks you need are dependent on the particular car. I think there are hidden stats on each of the three cars, and I bet one of them is geared toward the highest speed and other toward the best handling. I messed around with different cars and settings in the Practice mode. I started out with drafting practice since that seems like the most important skill in the game, and I couldn’t keep up with Bill Elliott at all. I got my car to top out at 199 mph but that was too slow.

After a few hours of getting nowhere, I took to the internet for help. There is not much to go on. GameFAQs has two FAQs on this game, and neither one is very detailed. One of them had speed/handling stats for the cars, but I have no idea where that came from or if it is even accurate. Ignoring that, I looked on YouTube. I found a video where the creator wins Daytona using the Chevrolet Lumina. He got the car to top out at 202 mph which was better than I figured out on my own for any setup. I copied his configuration to get that top speed, and now I was at least keeping pace with Bill Elliott in practice.

You can extensively customize what you want to fix.

It was time to start trying out the Championship Season. The first race was the oval track at Daytona. With the 20 mile default race, that meant 8 laps around the track. I decided to qualify myself. I wasn’t placing that well at first, about as well as auto-qualifying. The strategy is to take the turns as far inside as you can. Near top speed, you need to rapidly tap Left as you hold the gas the whole time through the turn. With the proper settings, you can stay on the inside without veering off line for best results. To get into the turn, I let off the gas briefly to help steer. It’s a precise setup and technique, and any variance means you can start sliding out and lose speed.

There is an easy trick that really increases the odds of winning a race on an oval track. At around four laps in, the low fuel light flashes and you have to make a pit stop. Everyone will pit halfway through the race. You have enough fuel to go further than that. I didn’t pit with everyone else and tried to do so on the next lap. If you are near the lead, that will put you in first place for a little while. Now I don’t think you can get by the whole race without stopping for fuel, which is too bad because that would almost assure first place every time. What you can do is make your pit stop and fill up your gas tank only about halfway. You can leave pit lane anytime you want for any repair other than tire changes. You can save several seconds by filling up a bit and leaving early. It doesn’t seem like much, but saving just a few seconds extends your lead by a lot. Once I figured out the driving and pitting techniques, I had no trouble winning first place on any oval track. So that’s half the game figured out.

The road courses, on the other hand, I found much more difficult. The imminent danger here is crashing. It only takes one crash to knock you out of the race entirely. The first road course is Sears Point, which in my opinion is the hardest course in the game. It is almost all turns with few places you can speed up. The opponents are strong at taking turns, and they tend to get in your way when trying to pass. My keys to success here were learning the course and determining what top speeds I could take each turn without crashing. A couple turns are so sharp that I have to slam on the brakes early just to go slow enough to clear them. You then have to remember to downshift to get the best acceleration and get back to good racing speed. I had to tweak the settings again, most notably increasing the gear ratio so that I could get better acceleration at the expense of needing to shift more frequently. The good news is that with the default settings, you only run three laps. The bad news is that no one pits so you can’t save time there. It’s best to finish at least 3rd, but maybe you can get by with a spot or two lower if you can make it up later.

I can barely see Bill Elliott behind all this traffic.

The other road course in the game is Watkins Glen. This course has fewer turns than Sears Point and contains some long straightaways where you can build up good speed. Again, it’s best to learn what speed you can take each turn for best results. I figured out an exploit on this course. If you stay on the far outside entering a turn, you can drive straight as fast as you want and the outside grass of the course nudges you along through the curve. That means for a right turn, get all the way left to start, and vice versa. As long as you get all the way to the side and drive completely straight, you won’t crash. You do lose a lot of speed doing this and it damages your car, but it is much more consistent than braking and steering into the turn yourself, plus avoiding crashes is wonderful. I learned I could also use this strategy on Sears Point, but it was not very effective since there isn’t enough room to build up speed for the really sharp turns. I didn’t crash, but I always lost position. But the strategy is perfect for Watkins Glen.

My entire run of the game took 12-15 hours to complete. I reset the game countless times after crashing or finishing poorly, and luckily the game retains your password when you reset so you can go right back where you left off. I managed first place on all the oval tracks and I always gained 10 points in the standings each time. The way the scoring works is that there is a 5 point difference between places within the top 6, a 5 point bonus for leading any lap, and a 10 point bonus for leading the most laps. You can’t get both bonuses. Bill earned the 5 point bonus since he led initially, but then I got 10 points for leading the rest of the way after pitting. The second race, Sears Point, was where I spent the bulk of the time playing. I managed a first-place victory after many attempts but broke even in the standings. Bill got the 10 point bonus for leading the first two laps before I won the final lap. Race 4 at Watkins Glen I won and extended my lead by 15 points by leading all laps. Race 6 was a replay of Sears Point and I just barely finished in second place, losing those 15 points right back to Bill in the process. That gave me a 40 point lead entering the final race at Watkins Glen. In my gameplay video I attempted the course a couple times and only finished once in 5th place. That was good enough to secure a 10 point season victory!

I found Bill Elliott’s NASCAR Challenge to be, well, quite a challenge to play. The game itself is well made. Graphics are quite nice. The physics and handling are about as realistic as you would expect on the NES. There isn’t a bunch of music in the game, but the few tracks are well composed. There is no music when driving. You hear the engine and squealing noises as you drive around, but the audio cues you get are very helpful as your attention visually is often divided. The passwords are awful, especially with punctuation like slashes involved. I think they could have been made smaller, but it’s really a minor gripe. Kudos to Distinctive Software for creating a quality NES racing title. This game did not turn me into a racing fan and I am not going to start liking playing racing games very much. I just think it’s important to give credit where it’s due. Bill Elliott’s NASCAR Challenge is a good NES game, even if I don’t care for it.

#81 – Bill Elliott’s NASCAR Challenge

Take pursuit of the top score as the bad guys pursue you.

The font is a bit hard to read.

To Beat: Complete the Winter season and the River section
Played: 11/21/16 – 11/23/16
Difficulty: 5/10
My Difficulty: 5/10
Video: Spy Hunter Longplay
Bonus Video: Spy Hunter Glitch

This is another first for Take On The NES Library with the first racing game covered on the site. However, if you know anything about Spy Hunter then you’ll already know that this is a loose claim at best. Since Spy Hunter is less about racing and more about combat, survival, and high scores, we will have to save the first true racer for another day.

Spy Hunter is originally an arcade title released by Bally Midway in 1983. It was supposed to be a James Bond game and it carries that kind of vibe. Spy Hunter was popular enough to spawn a pinball game bearing the same name in 1984. Later the game was ported to a host of home computers and other consoles. The sequel Spy Hunter II was released in 1987 and featured more of a 3D perspective from above and behind the car as opposed to an overhead view. The NES port of Spy Hunter was also released in 1987 and was both developed and published by Sunsoft. In 1991, Sunsoft released a Famicom title called Battle Formula which plays as a racing shooter game similar to Spy Hunter. When they brought the game to the NES, they obtained the Spy Hunter license from Bally Midway and released the game as Super Spy Hunter in 1992.

Spy Hunter experienced periods of dormancy sandwiched between a number of reboots. The next Spy Hunter game was released in 2001 along with a sequel, Spy Hunter 2, in 2003. Around that time a Spy Hunter movie was starting up but it has not yet seen the light of day. There was a movie tie-in game called Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run that was released in 2006 anyway despite no movie release to go with it. After another long quiet spell, yet another video game reboot of Spy Hunter was developed for handhelds in 2012. There have been rumors that a Spy Hunter film is still in development as recently as 2015, but at this point it seems unlikely this will ever come to fruition.

Just crusin’ along!

Spy Hunter is a top-down racing and shooting game. You control the G-1655 CIA Prototype Interceptor as you are being chased by a bunch of enemy agents who only want to destroy you. Your task is to take out the enemy agents, protect innocent bystander vehicles, and drive as far as you can.

The controls are simple. Use the D-Pad to steer your vehicle left and right. You go faster by holding up and you slow down by pressing Down. Your Interceptor is armed with a machine gun that you can fire with the B button. If you have a special weapon you can use it with A, and the Select key will switch between special weapons if you have more than one. There is no pause feature with the game which is a significant omission as far as I’m concerned.

When you begin the game you are unloaded by the big brown weapons van and you can start driving right away. Your score counter is displayed on the upper-right of the screen and it increases as you drive. You want to stay on the pavement since you don’t get score while you are riding along the edge of the road. If you go faster you accrue points more quickly while at a higher risk of crashing. There are a number of vehicles and hazards that will get in your way from both ahead and behind so you want to maintain a decent speed. You also earn points by defeating the enemy agents. If you happen to bump into or destroy a non-enemy vehicle your score counter blinks and stops increasing for a little while.

Try to avoid shooting the regular cars.

There is also a time counter on the bottom-right that ticks down pretty fast from 999. The timer ties to an interesting mechanic concerning your lives. As long as the timer is running, you can crash your vehicle and you can get right back on the road with no penalty. The timer runs out quickly and it only counts down once at the start of the game, so this juncture is when you want to be more careful. You want to drive well enough to earn at least 10,000 points before the timer runs out. Fail to reach that score and your next crash ends your game immediately. However, if you reach that mark then you get an extra life that is shown where the timer used to be displayed. If you play really well and get to 30,000 points you get another extra life, and you can earn another life at every 30,000 points beyond that.

The enemy vehicles on the road all share the same deep blue color so you can easily distinguish them from the others. There is a skinny enemy called the Tire Slasher. You can easily shoot it with your machine gun when it is in front of you, but if it gets to your side it will deploy spikes out of its tires and try to collide with you, causing you to lose control of your vehicle completely. The second enemy agent is a thick car called a Bullet Proof Bully. Naturally this vehicle is immune to your machine gun, so the way to take it out is to bump it off the road with your Interceptor. This enemy will try and do the same to you, so be careful. The third agent is a long Limousine. This vehicle attacks you via a backseat passenger firing a pistol out the side windows whenever you run along side of it, so you want to avoid approaching it just as you want to avoid the Tire Slasher. There is a fourth enemy which is a white helicopter. This is the only flying vehicle and you can hear it coming long before you see it. The helicopter drops deadly bombs on the road that create a deadly pothole in the ground should you run over it.

The helicopters are relentless!

To help fend off the enemies, you can find three special weapons. At certain times the same brown van that drops you off at the start appears with a symbol on the top. If you get close to the van it drops a ramp so that you can drive up into the back of the van. If you do this, the van will pull over to the side of the road and drop you off with your new weapon. The weapons are indicated by letters in the upper-left corner of the screen. The one denoted by an S is the smoke screen which lets you spew a wide fan of smoke out of the back of your Interceptor. This pretty much causes everything behind you to crash, including innocent drivers which halts your score counter. The M is a homing missile that is used solely to take out the helicopter. You have to drive in a way to keep the helicopter still long enough so that you can hit it, and getting the hang of it takes some time. The O is an oil slick which drops a car-wide stream of oil behind you. The effect is similar to the smoke screen but it is much easier to target a single enemy. These weapons are useful but if you crash you lose them all.

As you drive you will occasionally find forks in the road. You have to be careful to pick a side so that you don’t crash in the median. You will also drive across long bridges. When you come out of the other side the background scenery changes. There are four different areas you drive through and each one corresponds to a season. You can bounce around a bit between the different seasons, but usually you go through Spring, Summer, Fall, and then Winter.

If you get really far into the game you will eventually come across a small branching path to the left with a small building at the end. It’s very easy to miss it when you are going fast, and it is completely optional anyway. Drive into the building and you switch over to a boat and drive on the river. There are two types of enemy boats you will encounter and no friendly vehicles to avoid. Cruise boats fire torpedoes both ahead and behind them, and speed boats drop explosive barrels you need to navigate around. Enemy helicopters can also join the fray. You can stay on the water for as long as you want, or eventually you can find a path back to the boathouse and get back on the road.

The water is more dangerous than the road.

Looking around online, it seems a common rumor about Spy Hunter back in the day was that the game eventually has an ending if you play long enough. I can put that rumor to rest: Spy Hunter is an endless game. With an endless game comes deciding on what constitutes a win. The closest thing Spy Hunter has to levels are the seasons and the river. Winter is always the last unique season you will encounter in the game, so my winning condition is to drive through the Winter scene and also survive one loop of the river.

Spy Hunter is one of my childhood games and one that I spent time with on an occasional basis. Play sessions are pretty short so this was a good choice for a pick up and play game. I never committed to it long enough to ever get really good at the game, so this was my first real shot and beating it and seeing everything the game has to offer.

Because Spy Hunter is a pretty short game I ended up recording all my attempts, so I have some hard data on my effort in beating the game. It took me 18 attempts over almost exactly an hour and a half of total playtime. 17 of those attempts took place the first night I played, and the next time I sat down to play I had my winning run on the first try. I took on the river at my first opportunity and ended up getting through it for the first time in my life. The river scene was a childhood gaming nemesis that I was super proud to finally conquer. Going from car to boat or vice versa is the only time the game stops for long enough to capture a proper picture since there is no pause feature. I managed to capture a quick image with my camera even though I hadn’t technically finished the game yet. I was able to drive well enough to pass through Winter and beat the game with a final score of 108,595.

I don’t think many Spy Hunter players have seen this snow!

My 11th attempt was where I got my highest score. I looped through Winter twice and was going pretty well when I decided to go for it and try the River. Unfortunately, I failed out pretty fast. I earned a score of 134,525. I don’t remember what happened after that but I must have been pretty disappointed that I missed my best chance to that point. I stopped recording for a little while and then started back up again a little later. Those last attempts that night were not very good so I smartly cut my losses and went to bed.

During my 4th attempt I unintentionally triggered a glitch that soft-locked my game. I was trying to drive into the weapons van when I bumped into another car at the same time. The game started the sequence of steering the Interceptor into the van without actually putting the car inside. It left my car in a state where it was hovering over the road where I couldn’t move it and no one could touch it. That’s the first time I’ve seen that happen while playing and I had no choice but to reset and start over. I bet the timing of the glitch is really tough to reproduce!

Spy Hunter is a classic game that would be a good fit it any NES collection. There may not be a lot of substance to the game, but it plays well and it is a great game to pop in if you just want to kill a few minutes. I’m just glad to say that after all these years of playing that I have finally seen all there is to see, and it didn’t take me nearly as long as I thought!

#38 – Spy Hunter