Race

You rev your bike and speed down the track racing against on-coming traffic just for kicks and to reach the end.  Unfortunately that sounds more exciting than the game is in reality.   Race is a very basic game even for when it was released.  Sure it had scrolling, it had redefined character graphics and it was very polite (from instructions to saying bye when you quit), but it was only fun the first few plays.

Once you are past the instructions you can choose a difficulty setting from 1 to 4, 1 being easy and 4 impossible.  Why they made a difficulty setting so high is a mystery - maybe it was just to show off how fast the scrolling could get

You control a bike heading down the screen, which is where the scrolling comes in.  The scrolling looks like it’s simply the print command reaching the bottom of the screen and forcing an automatic scroll up (I would not be surprised).   The bike is kind of like a space invader, but you can imagine what they were trying to draw in that 8×8 pixel character.  Ahead of you are the cars, driving towards you, or more accurately advancing with the scrolling (they don’t actually move!).  The cars look more like cars than the bike looks like a bike, but I guess it’s easier to draw them.

You can press S to stop, which really means quit the level, or you can press z and / keys to move left and right.  You’ll need to do this to avoid the cars as you approach them.  To the left of each line on the screen is a number, denoting the distance you have travelled.  Once you reach 300 the game is over.  Really, it’s over.  You can play again, and choose a harder level, but that’s it folks.  If you hit a car or the kerb you crash and burn … or turn into some dots to represent your pixelated body parts (or so I imagine).

There’s not a great deal of challenge on the first couple of difficulty settings.  The nearer you get to 300 the faster the scrolling gets and the harder it is to dodge the on-coming cars.  Still, it’s fairly easy to survive as there is only one car per line on the screen so there’s always a path through the traffic.

To be fair, this game has appeared in cheap-o-McDonald toys from time to time and compared to those, Race is infinitely better.  Unfortunately infitity in Vic20 Race does have it’s limits and you’ll probably try out the handy quit option before long. 

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