"Aaaaagh.. What can be said about this game?"

''In 21st century, people has started dwell in smaller communities due to decrease population problems, energy loss and problems that goes with it. While it eliminated some problems, this style of life created another. Because automoble became valiable tools, packs of terrorists would form and they would loot and destroy any towns with their huge assalut vicheles. Working as registance against these bandits, you will one day go home and find your town empty. You rush into your house and find note which read, ''your wife and kids are with us, come to ZapTown within 24 hours. Otherwise, your family will die along with everybody in your town.'' Now you only have 24 hours to get to ZapTown and crash these scums. You have no time to waste....''

This was capcom's 11th game and it was mixture between racing and action. Not too much can be said about this game except for negative things. Though they possesed good graphics and good sounds at its time, it also possesed almost no control at all. On top of that it had no game balance as well. In another words, playing this game was like sheer torture. You would not believe how many quaters it took to finish this game.

This was first ''spy hunter'' kind of game that gave you more control over your vichele than your usual ''over-view vertical scrolling, only options being move left or right and limited front and rear movement'' method. And it was very nice of them to try. Such innovative thinking always has been a capcom trade mark, but it seems this time they had to pay the price for such a adventure. It may seemed simple game with one joystick and two buttons, but control in this game was just insane. Buttons were for firing gun and for ejecting car, and it was easy. But controling part of this game...
Your vichele could move to any directions granted you're facing front. If you put your joystick in rear direction, it serves as brake. Simple enough? No!! It may be OK as long as you're going foward, but once screen starts to scroll to any directions, you can forget about it. Say you are turning to left or right, odds are you will more likely swarve to whichever direction you were going. (and you will swarve like you are on ice.) Once you did, let's say your car came to halt facing bottom of screen. Now, which directions in joystick should you choose to get your vichele going? You'd think down in joystick, right? Wrong! You have to put it in up. But let's say you came to halt at down+right angle, now which direction should you choose to get going? Up+left you might think, but in this case you have to put your lever in same direction which is down+right. This is very confusing. And very very confusing.
To make matters worse, in each stages there will be auto-scrolling area where you can get stack and crashed to death or lot of objects(some of them moving at you) which could kill you upon making contact, laid out enormously. You can also fall off the cliff very easily. The lack of control just gave you infinite amount of death traps everywhere possible. This was one of the toughest game I ever played.

You will have to go through colorful six stages in order to release your family and towns-folks. You are provided with cars with life-bar which you could power-up along the way, and your own lives. This means you might lose your car due to fierce attacks of your enemies, but if you abandon your car before it explode using your eject botton, you will survive as tiny little guy and should be able to retrive your car which would be delivered by your allies shortly. While it was nice touch by capcom to add this little feature, in reality once you lose your car you are more likely dead already anyway. It was almost impossible to control ''little guy''(and he was really small) while facing two or three enemy cars which seemed always being there throughout game at any time. Even if you get lucky and be able to wait for your new car, odds are your dear comrades will place it somewhere unreachable. (like in middle of ocean off the cliff or on top of some building) And as if it wasn't bad enough, you are on time limits and if you happen to exceed that time limit, you will lose a life instantly and have to start all the way back from beginning of stage that you are in. It seemed there were just way too much obstackle against you. Graphics were pretty good even most of characters were rather small. Sounds were pretty catchy too. It is unfortunate that you won't have too much time enjoying them since you are gonna always have to be on your toes. In capcom tradition, you have to beat it twice to end game.

All in all, they did have average-capcom (which means generally better than avarage) graphics and sounds, but because of its lack of control and game balance, it failed to appeal to your average gamers. Surely, play it enough your memory could help going through this game, but when tool weren't provided to do specific job, results are too predictable. It was nice try by capcom to blends both factors of racing game and action game. But unfortunately this game offered neither good tempo of racing game nor fun and excitement of action game. This game manifested only bad elements of both games instead of good ones. It is painful and frustrating to play this game. Unless you are collecter of capcom games of sort, you might want to stay away from this one. Learning from their mistake, next racing-shooter game capcom released later on called ''Last Duel'' was formatted with ''overview proceeding to top of screen'' style. Though it went back to its old format, this game was far more fun to play with. As for this ''Speed Rumbler'', unless you are looking for serious challenge, you shouldn't waste your money on this one.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 08/21/00, Updated 08/21/00