Speed Racer

The Good
Racing games are almost ubiquitous across the 8 bit era, every machine had multiple efforts, but surprisingly the Dragon and its Co-Co cousin had very few of note. This is probably the second best racing game on either the Dragon or Co-Co, a fun Pole Position clone that feels like it owes more to fantasy race games of the era such as Elektraglide than to the more realistic simulations. At the time of release this was miles ahead of every other vehicle based race game on the platform, most of which were top-down perspective games. Graphically it only really works in the hi res black and white mode, the Dragon's garish green colour set will just about work for most settings if you are prepared to pretend space is dark blue, but here there is no getting away from it, there is simply is no combination of colours on offer that will work, and frankly it is not worth using artifacted colours with an NTSC Dragon either. The movement scrolling to indicate movement is quite well-handled, albeit it is slightly jerky at points, but the well pitched, fast pace of the game just about means that you don't really notice imperfections in the movement. The sound is perfectly serviceable, although its missing title music, not great by the machine's standards but not an embarrassment either. The main thing the game has going for it is a simple and exceptionally responsive control system - forward to accelerate, back to decelerate, left to right to steer- which combined with an excellent collision detection give rise to some really straightforward gameplay where the user never feels cheated and inevitably wants "just one more game". At the higher speeds you can pass a ridiculous number of cars in matter of seconds but with a small margin for error, making it pretty exhilarating. Sadly for Speed Racer fans, a couple of years after release a well-known serious programmer for the platform by the name of Pam D'Arcy released Formula One, a superb split screen multiple track race game high on realism complete with its own track designer. By comparison Speed Racer was made to look like a poor relation and became largely forgotten, which is a shame as it was probably the more addictive of the two.

The Bad
Realistically for me a two player mode should always be a must for race games, but it would be churlish to hold the lack of this it against it- things were done differently back then and one player only games were common. What is more relevant is that with just four tracks the game does lack the complexity it should have had. The Dragon was an exceptionally memory efficient computer with a decent processor- its version of Jet Set Willy was bigger than the Spectrum's on 16 K less memory- so it is not unreasonable to expect more complexity in the track option department.

The Bottom Line
Not a racing simulation by any stretch of the imagination, but a jolly fun, albeit simple race game, one of the better ones for the system. Just don't play it in colour.