"The car chase! The treasure hunt in a maze! The game with an inexplicable X tacked onto the end!"

In Rally-X, you drive your car around a maze(block, not wall) that takes up about eight screens while trying to pick up ten flags and avoid enemy cars. You have a radar that doesn't shape the maze but tells you where the cars and flags are, and you also have a fuel gauge depleted by time and by smokescreens you can leave behind that stall the other cars for a bit. The maze has no official dead-ends, although there are ditches you may fall into later on. The other cars are also stalled by the ditches but jump over them afterwards, and if two cars collide, they spin out for a bit.

The scoring in Rally-X is not terribly complicated, but it is well-apportioned. You get a hundred points for the first flag, two hundred for the second, and so on up to the tenth. The reward is doubled if you grab the special flag(denoted with an S,) and at the end of a level you get bonus points depending on how much fuel you have left. The fuel is restored if you lose a man, and you can even drive through enemy cars a few seconds after the restart. This makes it easier to grab tough flags and complete the level, but the flag score is reset to a hundred as well, and you lose your double bonus. There's no reward for causing enemies to crash other than seeing them spin out and buying yourself some time.

Every four levels from the third there is a ''charanging stage'' where the other cars stand still and you just need to pick up all ten flags before your fuel runs out, after which the road map changes. Although you eat up fuel more quickly, there's not much charange, as the only time I lost in it was when I was having a bad games anyway and just wanted to check if the usual ways to crash would work--they did, and I was kicked to the next level minus a car. I actually like this idea better than its later reincarnation in Galaga. Minimal pressure, free points, and you don't have to remember which arbitrary patterns occur and when.

Rally-X's controls are quite forgiving. You'll need to weave a lot in your car, and having to move your joystick continually while moving would probably give no time to glance at the radar and see if the other cars are about to trap you or hit you head-on. However, if you get to a part where you must turn, Rally-X does it for you. If there's only one way to go then it knows that default but if you have the joystick held diagonally it will turn in the appropriate direction. At T-intersections movement is random, and you can also perform u-turns although the game has to take time to turn your car around then. You'll need as many conveniences as you can get to track down that flag in the cul-de-sac safely, and you get them.

The levels have some degree of randomness to them but show some mercy. If you play this game a few times, flags will seem to have favorite places to stay, but the special flag always appears in different places among them. Yet ditches stay put in any string of non-charange levels. And as you get through more levels, more cars will appear, and they will get slightly faster than you. You start off having to outwit three, but one joins in each level until cars have to appear at the top, which cancels out the rush for the upper regions that serve so well in the first levels. There are also fewer turnpikes and more wide streets(most start one car wide, but two-wides make for fewer enemy crashes even if brave players can run past them.) The only real breaks you get are that you have five seconds during the level intro to see where all the flags are, and the cars wait a bit before they start up.

The graphics, while not profound, change icons every four levels--beyond the maze edges you have trees and flowers, and the block edges contrast with the road well and even have rounded edges. You can even see the cars turning--there's an intermediate diagonal position before you move back on your way. The instructions even have a nice touch, with words popping up as your car drives past, cute enough to make up for the bad English. The in-car visuals are also set out well, with the radar just below the fuel gauge, and with both in the center right, referencing them is more convenient than the occasional necessary glance in the rear-view mirror.

It would have been neat to have many-colored enemy cars or something, but the cars' wheels are a different color from the body(hear that, Targ?) which is not bad for an early game. Also if you fall in a ditch the noiseless ''BANG'' that indicates a crash is not transparent, leaving a weird half-ditch. But there's nothing really to complain about here.

Sound works well, with a ragtime tune to start your game and a goofy lullaby to announce your high score, which appears in quotes. I like the noiseless ''bang,'' and the background tune varies itself nicely before it loops. Your motor's different sounds that depending on the direction you're moving help create a varying baseline so that the overall sound doesn't repeat. The only downer is the sequence of beeps when you get an extra guy. That control-G thing is just fine for homebrew Apple Basic programs but not for video games, and Namco's early video games have no shortage of fun bouncy tunes--why not throw in another?

Rally-X was not cute or easy enough to gain tremendous popularity, as on the later levels you'll need to memorize the map's rough outlines and where ditches are. New Rally-X paved over some of Rally-X's shortcomings and bad English although it may not have done enough to justify being called ''Super Rally-X''--in a way, it shows that Rally-X is a stable enough game to stand on its own. I always like games that imply a certain math problem(in this case, an extension of the Traveling Salesman problem) and tie it in to considerable action, and the random factor here is tangible enough to make each new game feel distinct. There's even a bit of luck when you're looking for the special flag. The overall combination, requiring spur-of-the-moment strategizing and not just reacting, makes it easy for me to overcome my usual bias against games featuring cars.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 01/06/02, Updated 01/06/02