"Ferrari, why? Why? WHY?"

First of all I would just like to clarify that I am reviewing this game in comparative terms of what else was on the market at the time, so I am not, repeat, NOT, going to even try to compare this to Gran Turismo 3 and the like. Well, to the review!

Ferrari Grand Prix Challenge – wow, this does take me back! Based on a Formula 1 season (from tracks to the points system) of yesteryear this game was always going to be a Formula 1 game with the Ferrari logo on it. Included are three (count ‘em, three) modes, Championship (where you race every race against 26 other opponents, the one with most points by the end of it winning the championship), Quick Race (where you have a quick jaunt around a track of your choosing) and Password (the bit where you can put in a password to carry on from a season midway through). Remember for circa early nineties this was pretty good stuff!

On the game are sixteen tracks, all of which are identical (layout-wise) to their real life counterparts of the time. Indeed, you will find the old Silverstone track layout for the British Grand Prix here as well as a few tracks not featured in the F1 season anymore. So by playing this you in fact are reciting history in more ways that one! However the same can’t be said about the cars and drivers unfortunately. None of the names (including your Ferrari teammate) are the real life drivers of the time (unless A. Sessions WAS the Ferrari driver of the time!). The team names are the same (Shannon anyone?). What can also be annoying to some is that the teams are made up of 2, 3 or even 4 drivers (which doesn’t happen in Formula 1 anymore). OK, so this isn’t an official F1 game, but if it is so blatantly based on it why did they slip up here? Of course most people who want the official names would buy an officially licensed game, so those who buy this shouldn’t be bothered too much by it (I wasn’t anyway).

So, lets go through the game itself. We have selected championship and put our name in. We are then presented with the first race, the American Grand Prix (the older street track, not the current one at Indy) and the qualifying screen. All well and good, the game gives you qualifying, so off you go! You then are presented the actual racing screen with the dashboard. Two quite novel ideas on the dashboard are the inclusion of a rear view mirror, which although small and ultimately useless (because most cars will only pass you when you crash and at that time they pass at high speed) it’s quite nice to see, and a radio (which should be called a pager because the various messages that come up are in text format on the dashboard located at the bottom of the screen). I do bash these a little, but then again these ideas are early and primitive forms of the rear view mirror we take for granted on so many games and the radio that a lot of rally games have. Everything begins somewhere! You have all your other gadgets on the dashboard too, like speed, revs, position etc. A map is located at the bottom right of the screen too, and during a race will show where you are as well as first, second and third’s position on the track.

You are given a lap to qualify, so if you mess up then that is tough luck (or you can reset the NES but during the middle of a championship you wouldn’t want to do that for reasons I will explain later). Once you have qualified you enter the race. This is where a few things really strike you. The first thing is that no matter how fast you go in qualifying you will qualify 26th out of 26th in most races (in the USA it’s usually seventeenth), so there is seemingly little point in qualifying. The second thing is that when you pull away at the start of the race, no matter how well and cleanly you pull away the rest of the field always disappear off into the distance! I also tend to find that you can race just about all of the races with your thumb right down on the accelerator button with the need to slow down for the few challenging corners easily done by letting go of the accelerator. The brake button is more optional here than anything else!

Graphically the scenery is very, very bland, even for the NES era. Your track is always the same one shade of grey with a broken white line speeding away in the middle, surrounded by the same green and brown striped grass on either side. This monotony is only broken by the odd oil spill on the track (as indicated by your radio beforehand), three pit lane signs and the pit lane (which is nothing more than separate lane split by the red and white curbing you see all around the entire track)!. Needless to say, graphically this is lagging behind even back on its release date.

If I was to talk about the gameplay, I would say this is quite entertaining for a little while at first until you see the number of problems that the game has. Although the game features things that even a lot of today’s game neglect (car crashes, oil spills on the track) it doesn’t do them well. A car crash consists of a car on fire (supposedly) in the middle of the track. However this game manages to somehow pervert the laws of physics into making fire instantly transferable and so if you are to crash yourself into the crashed car on track, not only is your race over, but the crashed car you crashed into is crashed no more! That’s right, it will then proceed to race straight into the distance! What is up with that?! The oil spills aren’t spectacular either, with three splodges of oil placed on the particular part of track the radio highlights. The pit stops are OK, with you racing into the pit lane then bashing the A and B buttons simultaneously as fast as you can to get your car out fast. You even see the pit men changing your tyres! However a pit stop isn’t necessary on a 6 lap race, so there is no point in this feasture at all, and those are the least of the games problems!

After a while you find that no matter you hard you try there is a certain position on each track that is attainable but after that you might as well give up. For example, on Monaco you can get fourth place but anything after that is impossible. Thankfully a lot of the tracks allow a fighting chance for first so it isn’t as though beating the game itself is impossible. It does annoy you though that certain tracks have this. The other quite annoying aspect of the gameplay is the ‘Position Limit’. After every intermediate (checkpoint) on every track the maximum position limit goes down one position, so anyone behind the limit has to retire e.g. if you are fifteenth and the Position Limit after you pass an intermediate is fourteenth, you must retire. However if you are thirteenth you can race on. This isn’t annoying as long as you are doing well, but because each track is 6 laps long (on any mode) it means that to finish the race you must be at least sixth i.e. in the points! What is the point, it is hardly realistic and the game can take 26 cars racing (otherwise it wouldn’t start with 26). I can only put this down to the game not able to handle anyone not finishing in the points, in which case this is extremely poor programming. It does though add an arcade type element to the game.

After you finish your race you get the finishing positions and championship standings tables to look at (although each show only the top six positions) and the game generously gives you a password after you skipped those. Do you remember me saying that you wouldn’t want to reset the machine if you mess up? That is because to get back to where you were you have to put in a password that is very, very long! Very annoying to write down, even more annoying to put in (and when you find your password doesn’t work, well just hope it doesn’t happen. You will get angry, VERY angry, put it that way).

To say this is a bad game is unfair, because it isn’t. It kept me entertained for hours in my youth, and for all its niggles it isn’t too bad to play. It had a few good ideas that eventually were improved on by other games and now feature in some of today’s best racing games. The selection of tracks was good (although only the one car was available) and featured a pit in mode (not necessary, but fun nonetheless). But when you think of games like Micro Machines for the NES and the various other games (not necessarily racers) that were on the NES at the time, you really would have thought that the development team could have come up with something better, more polished and more original and not what could easily be referred to as Pole Position – Ferrari Championship Edition. There isn’t enough here to make this game a classic, and although it can boast to be a game with some great early concept ideas, the bottom line is that there is nothing here that makes the game memorable.

I will give this game a very harsh 4, I think a 5 is too good for this game quite honestly because of the amount of problems (small and big) in it, but a 4 is implying that this game is quite below the standard for its time, which is certainly not the case as there is too much here for it to be so. Consider this an official GameFAQ’s four, and an unofficial 4.5. I enjoyed playing this, but only for a while. I didn’t have the desire to play it after I won the championship and I did play other games on my NES that I preferred to this a hundredfold (Super Mario Bros 3 anyone?).

So that is my review, one more down towards my goal as the ultimate games reviewer! See you round my friends :-)

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 10/27/03