Road Rash

"The cartridge game with a bad cassette soundtrack"

Ever wonder why as a teenager, everyone hates everything in the world around them? Its because being a teenager is just a series of underwhelming letdowns. Things get so hyped up in your head, that by the time you experience something, no matter how good it is, it still isn't as great as you thought it would be. Things like Road Rash for Sega CD led to a lot of teenage angst during the early nineties. Though it's not really that bad of a game, it's one of those the only thing you can say about it is ''Eh, its alright.''

I played and loved both of the previous RR on Genesis. I had a Sega CD, and after playing games like Silpheed and Thunderstrike, I knew what kind of horsepower was behind it. I knew what limitations that were on the cart versions, and I could only dream of how cool the Sega CD one was going to be. Heck, with all that extra memory and all that nifty hardware scaling, how could one not be blown away? Wouldn't it be great? I was torn between getting RR CD and RR3 for Genny. I figured the CD one just had to be better…right?

Nope. After buying and playing Road Rash for the first time, I could honestly say that while it didn't suck horribly, it wasn't anything like it should have been. Road Rash for Sega CD is not an original effort, its merely a dumbed down port of the 3DO game (which was also dumbed down for the Playstation). This in itself isn't too bad, but then again, not too good either.

It has the standard RR formats, arcade mode or career mode. Earn cash for bigger bikes..blah blah. It has 5 courses that get longer as the level progress. You can also save your progress to the internal RAM. Controls like usual (smooth, effectively). Incredibly, the load times aren't bad at all. It also features tunes from some early nineties grunge/alternative slop bands. But how does it stack up to the previous RR's?

Well, right off the bat you get some grainy, pinkish, ¼ screen FMV. Get used to it, as its spread out all over the game, and you will soon tire of it after the 100th time you see it. You get a rather clunky menu interface with some grainy backgrounds that obviously saw better days on the 3DO. The pictures of people in the menu's are distorted to make them look cartoonish, but the effect just ends up making them look retarded and ugly. You can visit the bike shop and also listen to the game's soundtrack.

But what about the game, you ask? It plays exactly like every RR before it. Problem is, it looks a bit worse than every RR before it. As I said, the graphics are dumbed down ports of the 3DO game. All the characters and things in the 3DO game were digitized from real live stuff. On the Sega CD, it ends up with everything having a super-grainy and pixilated quality to it. You're character looks like he stepped out from a black and white TV.

Strangely enough, all the courses pretty much look the same. You won't find any big environmental differences like a bunch of snow on one level, or the autumn leaves on another. All levels pretty much look like a highway going through green grass. Strange, because the ''Crowded City'' level looks almost exactly like the ''Backwoods country-type'' level. Well, except the city level has more shoebox sized houses.

Yep, that's right. Skyscrapers that are about 7 feet tall from what I can gather. Electronic Arts must have not gotten the ''HARDWARE SCALING'' section of their Sega CD programming manual, because every single solitary bit of extra might that the Sega CD has that the Genesis doesn't was completely ignored. Everything from the backgrounds to the characters scales just like the Genesis versions do. Now, on one hand this isn't really bad….after all, it worked for the first 2 RR's. In reality though, this game could have been silky smooth if EA would have got of their posteriors and took advantage of the hardware. This is the main reason that I look at RR CD as a complete cash cow by EA.

The sounds are the standard RR fare. A few grunts and some bumblebee engine sounds, along with some smacks and thuds. The background music is the aforementioned grunge/alternative and has about a dozen songs. Its really not too bad, although the music is streamed and it sounds sort of like a dirty cassette tape with a bad hiss. You can only listen to a set 3 songs on each course. Regardless of whether you like that type of music or not, its still leaps and bounds above the Ps version's in game music. I can't speak for the 3DO version, but the Ps version has the most ear-piercing BGM ever to disgrace a game.

Overall, Road Rash for Sega CD is not a bad game. In fact, its pretty fun in itself. It controls well, has some ok tracks, and has some all right tunes to go along. However, there is nothing (barring muddy FMV and AM radio quality songs) that this disk has that either of the other 3 RR's available on the cart format don't do better. Nothing within the game itself is any better than any of the cart versions. In fact, the in game graphics are a bit more colorful for the cart versions than this CD. There is no 2 player split screen mode on the CD too, so that subtracts a lot from the replay value.

If you are a big fan of the Road Rash series, RR for Sega CD isn't too bad. Hell, it's not that bad of a game at all. The problem is, it's released on a CD for a superior system, yet there is nothing better about it than the cart version of RR II that was released a year prior. Not a bad game, but not any better than any other version of Road Rash.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 07/13/01, Updated 07/13/01