Taito Grand Prix: Eikou e no License

"Taito Grand Prix" is a pretty unusual and ambitious racing game for the Famicom. It is one of the earliest games featuring tuning and upgrading your car. And that is not all. Between the races you can move around on a kind of overworld and visit different cities. In the cities are shops where you can buy car parts and take part in a few races. You start the game with a mini-van, after finishing low rank races you can upgrade to a ferrari. Successfully beating all courses will give you access to a complete formula 1 season. Content-wise the game offers quite a lot for its time. Gameplay is the usual Out Run, Pole Position mix. The games has lots of courses, but sadly they are also repetitive of course. Even the Formula 1 courses take place in the usual low rank areas (desert scenario in Italy?). That damped my initial enthusiasm quite a bit. Controls are ok. So in the end "Taito Grand Prix" was partly ahead of its time and partly just another standard driving game when it comes to the driving action itself.

teran01 # 2014-09-13 05:01:03

display: raster

The game notably allows players to exceed 255 kilometers per hour. 8-bit games must allocate two bytes of memory to exceed the number 255. Most action oriented games of at the time don't bother for any numbers to exceed 255 except for a score; they opted to allocate only 1 byte for any number that goes higher than the number 1.

This cartridge contains Save RAM and appears to have a battery door so that is can be replaced. However, the door is fake.

zerothis # 2013-07-30 19:31:33