Hello viewers and welcome to my channel. I am a middle aged scotsman who spends way too much time reminiscing about the good old days of video games, before micro transactions and DLC and all that nonsense, so I decided to make a few videos about my memories of those good times to share with others, and I also travel for my job so I sometimes do the odd hotel review as well, but its mostly the old school games that you will find on my channel. So jump in and have a gander as we say in Scotland at my warez, and thanks for stopping by.
I think I played it once in the arcades and was blown away by it but a pound a go was too truck for my blood. The Sega Ages version on the Nintendo Switch is a brilliant conversion by M2. Keep up the awesome work!
I was one of those suckers that stuck a quid in the machine at Blackpool as a lad to play this but it was fun. It was this and Daytona a bit later on in those days in the arcades.
Lol. This was the de facto driving simulator back in the late 80s with the polygon graphics and steering and I think even a clutch in the arcade version. Yes the physics are really over exaggerated. Makes you wonder if that was over done to get people to spend more money. And a home setup with mame and steering and peddles was complicated but doable. I've seen videos on here with properly calibrated wheels and players doing well. The best port I've played has been on a pc with Midway Arcade Treasures that can use a gamepad easily with time cheats. Yeah its a HARD game to play but is possible.
This is the worst review of this game. So many incorrect facts given. You didn't even bother to get real footage! Just emulated driving obviously using a keyboard to steer. Just because you are not good at it doesn't make it a bad game.
It was and still is one of the only "True" driving physics simulators to hit the arcade market, all of the other racing games out there even those that have much more advanced graphics are basicly an arcade driving experence , not a true driving simulator , and you absolutly can not play the game with keyboard or digital joystick input devices..
You're using digital inputs to drive an analog simulation. No wonder you thought it was crap. I always sought this out in the arcades - I got pretty good at it & would have people watching me navigate the track with power-slides and perfect jumps - I even used the clutch! It was such an involving game.
I remember this in the arcade back in the day. The talk of it originally being a driving simulator was definitely mentioned in one of the computer mags of the time. I tried it plenty of times in the arcade but never liked the feel of it at all. Sega’s Power Drift was so much more fun that year so would always try and find that in an arcade
After the videogame crash of 1984 Atari's parent company Warner Brother's split Atari up. The home division which had the 2600, 7800, Jaguar, Atari ST, and Falcon was sold off to Jack Tramiel and became Atari Corporation. Warner Brothers kept the arcade division renaming it Atari Games. So the company that made the computers was NOT the same company that made Hard Drivin.
This game, or a game very very similar looking, had the fun F1-car with a bug that gave instant max speed after a jump - and holding that max speed until you left of the accelerator or crashed. No crashes - "trainer mode" (cheat, or perhaps menu option) was used a lot, I remember😅 One thing I was amazed by, at the time, was the advanced and realistic graphic. I remember that I explored the map and looked at the different buldings, etc. And you even had road signs that looked real and could choose the speed- och the stunt course. Br
K... So your impression of this game was from when you were 14. And now it looks like you're replaying it on an emulator where you have a binary D-Pad mapped to the steering instead of something variable like at least a thumb stick. So I can understand your perception and opinion. Like another commenter said, I learned how to drive stick on this. Well, not Hard Drivn' rather Race Drivin' which was slightly refined and added the stunt track. Even in the arcade when I found Race Drivin' I could complete both tracks at the age of 16 so I have a much less gloomy opinion of it. These days I can play it on original Xbox as part of some classics pack.
while i completely understand your sentiments, i personally don't think it's fair to call this a bad game. given the fact that it came out in 1989, it was EXTREMELY ahead of its time visually and in all other ways including its physics. was it a bit of a glorified tech demo that was perhaps *too* far ahead of its time for its own good? perhaps yes. but it actually is possible to get good at the arcade version of the game though calling the controls nuanced is an understatement and it takes *a lot* of practice and patience. i won't say the same for the genesis or SNES ports, though, though it bears mentioning that "tengen" who handled the genesis port was actually just atari themselves. they sometimes used the name tengen instead of atari for their non-atari console games.
Hard Drivin' was groundbreaking but it wasn't quite the first arcade racing game to use 3D polygonal graphics. Winning Run by Namco beat it to arcades by about two months with its December 1988 release in Japan. I enjoyed the Genesis/Mega Drive version of Hard Drivin' for what it was, back when a 3D racing game only had to "work" to be good. As far as I know, Hard Drivin' was the first fully 3D racing game on any home console although I did already have Vette (1989) and, I think, also Test Drive III: The Passion for MS-DOS on PC by the time I got Hard Drivin' on the Genesis.
I agree with you that the best cars come from Europe.. and I also agree that this was a terrible simulator. Even Atari's Pole Position was way more life like in handling on an F1 car.
I took the driving course that our high school offered in the mid-80's. We had this trailer classroom with all of these driver simulators. We all watched a movie projected on the back walk and reacted to it. I got a low score so I knew it was BS seeing I played a ton of video games at the times I knew I wasn't THAT bad at driving. This would have been amazing to have in our school. As far as an arcade game, it sucked.The 3D was pretty cool for the time but it lacked real gameplay.
Great video! Ghostbusters and Choplifter were the 2 games we had when my dad surprisingly brought home our C64 in 1984 (i couldn't believe i had video games at home!)....it's a game i kept coming back to for the next few years, even as we ended up with dozens and dozens of games (due to pirate copies haha...good times). A few years ago i discovered Choplifter 3 when i added it to my hacked Snes Classic, and it's actually a great game.
The Megadrive game is using real polygons. And the overall library has more 3D games than you might suspect... For EA, the secret was to use the Z80 to help the 68000 do the calculations.
The appeal of the game, after you learn to play it well and you can take the stunts at the correct speeds without crashing, is to get farther down the road earning more time and making faster laptimes. Playing with a force feedback steering wheel really helps, not tapping on a keyboard roasting your tires with every violent virtual yank of the steering wheel. Part of the challenge is that the turns are flat and the tires fairly hard and it's easy to lose your grip--they designed it that way so it mimics how a real car handles, not how videogame cars handle.
Special Needs/Ed Class in high school had the "Virtual Drivers Ed" Program for Windows 3.1 Having a few friends who are now more understood as Autistic, in that class: I tried like hell to make a copy of the Installer Discs. But the teacher even being a fan of mine, wouldnt allow it LOL They had the Killer Steering & Shifting Setup, I just thought it was Fun as Hell to Play
I was blown away the first time I played Hard Drivin' on the sit in cabinet but really thought of it as a driving simulator. I even enjoyed it on the Atari ST much like I enjoyed playing a flight simulator like Falcon. Yes it was a short lived experience and Stunt Car Racer was a much better game but I still remember it fondly :-) Keep up the awesome work!
So.. The Commodore 64 version of this was so bad that it ONLY got released on a compilation.... Except if you were a member of The Home Computer Club... then you could have the pleasure of making this one of the, must pick at least 6 of the editors choice games in a 12 month period and could cough up the FULL £9.99 for the "pleasure". Yeah without question the WORST game I had on the C64 by a mile!
Crack Down is again, one of those games that pops up on pretty much every Mega Drive compilation and is one I usually skip over. But, when I do play it, I find it strangely enjoyable :-) Keep up the awesome work!
I would need to play this game again and see how far I can get. I've played it a couple of times but only for 5 or 10 minutes to beat the first level. The first thing that jumped out at me was the espionage-like aspect of being able to hug walls to avoid enemy gun fire and I was really impressed by the graphics from the Arcade version. I haven't played the Genesis port so I guess I can do both soon. 😃
For me it's one of those games that appear on every Mega Drive Collection and you usually skip over it but when you get round to playing it realise what a great game it is. I still play the arcade version on my Sega Astro Mini which does play a bit better but is, as you say, a bit harder :-) Keep up the awesome work!
I didn't know about this game until I was an older teenager in high school but it kinda reminds me of the Arcade version of Shinobi but you can't kill enemies and instead of rescuing children you're snatching up various wares. In either game you're doing things to trigger the exit to be able to complete the level. Super catchy music, adorable art style, challenging game play where you have to think and can't mindlessly blaze through it, and overall a solid Sega title. Once again, we have another IP Sega is just sitting on when they could be doing something with it. I'm glad it's been included in some compilation discs but they could easily reintroduce this to the masses today with modern polish that would make me buy it and I think would sell okay. 😃
Not that I owned a Neo Geo but I had a similar experience where I was so anxious to play the fighting games like Samurai Showdown 2 and Fatal Fury that when I saw images about Metal Slug and how large the game was I thought, "meh, I can skip the 'Cartoon Contra.'" Back in the early 2000s I was still on 56K dial-up because DSL hadn't become a thing where I lived yet so to download a huge game in the 10s of Megabytes would mean leaving my computer on all night into the morning hoping the connection didn't get lost or interrupted during the download having to start over. Long story short when I finally played it in the summer of 2002 I regretted just the couple years I could have been playing it in 1999-2000 when I first learned of it. 🙂
I liked this game especially the flame thrower effect but not as much as the others. I remember reading somewhere the guy who produced the game says one of his regrets was not properly balancing the difficulty which is something they wrestled with sometimes. Some cool trivia is that the Genesis port of this and Truxton were both done by the same team that had worked on the Arcade version and that's why they play so faithfully among other unavoidable things like systems limitations. Btw, since you're in a shooter mood lately, I dunno if you're open to suggestions but if you haven't already you may want to check out Phelios. It's a shooter done by Namco but instead of it being set in outer space or war planes it's semi-based around Greek mythology where you control Apollo flying on Pegasus' back shooting sword beams at things like dragons, skeletons, Medusa, etc. Pretty cool symphonic music, digital speech and lots of rotating/zooming affects as you traverse the levels. There was also a pretty faithful Megadrive port minus the bells 'n whistles. 😃
