Ivan ‘Ironman’ Stewart’s Super Off Road is a 1989 arcade release that plays kind of like a fancy Super Sprint. It’s a single screen game where three players race their trucks over a number of courses, picking up nitro and money, and upgrading their vehicles between races. It’s fast, goofy, chaotic and a lot of fun. The orginal arcade, notably, featured a three steering wheel cabinet.
On the face of it, this simple game looks ideal for home ports… but can they capture the mayhem of the original?
The Amstrad CPC port is, unsurprisingly, based on the Spectrum version. But in this case, they’ve at least attempted to include some colour. Sadly, this amounts to changing the track to orange-brown and adding colour to two of the cars, meaning that the other two remain resolutely orange-brown. It’s a curious choice, but I guess they ran into some four colour screen mode limit. It’s not terrible though, but it does suffer from some horrendous slowdown. Like the Spectrum, it allows for just two players.
Next up is the C64 version, and it’s pretty good. It’s more colourful than its 8-bit cousins, and it allows for up to three players. It moves and plays okay. But it feels a little bit stiffer, losing some of the chaotic speed of the original. Good attempt!
The Spectrum port is arrestingly yellow. Yellow cars on a yellow track, with your yellow car being distinguished by a yellow square above your vehicle that takes a good few seconds to spot. However, despite its monochrome shortcomings, the conversion itself is top notch. As is often the case with Speccy ports, you can’t hang your hat on either the graphics or the sound, but you will frequently find that the feel of the arcade original is captured surprisingly well. And that is totally the case here. Great speed, fluid control, a lot of fun! And some surprisingly good 128K sound!
So, for the 8-bit micros at least (the only comparison that really matters) a Speccy win!
For the posh kids, the Amiga got an effortlessly competent port. Lovely smooth graphics that perfectly capture the arcade original. Not much to say about this one, other than it’s very good indeed.
Over on the consoles, the SNES port is the best of the bunch. It looks, plays and sounds superb, retaining much of the original arcade and adding to it. Notably, the soundtrack is brilliant, with lots of catchy and memorable tracks. If you’re going to play just one home port of Super Off Road, pick this one. It’s rad!
The Megadrive/Genesis port… not so much. It’s not terrible, it just tries to add a uniquely Megadrive spin on the game, which doesn’t quite work. The end result is a drab looking version with a crunchy/scratchy Megadrive soundtrack which doesn’t play quite as well as the SNES version.
On the 8-bit consoles, the Mastersystem is the best of the two. It’s bright and crisp with good controls and smooth gameplay. The NES doesn’t fare so well, with an incredibly drab palette that somehow swaps red for pink on the main car. However, it supports up to four players, which makes it unique among the home ports and even the arcade!
Sadly, the handhelds don’t fare so well. All of them lose the single screen in favour of a scrolling play area, which tends to make the game feel a bit claustrophobic. The best of them is the Game Gear version, which is basically the Mastersystem version on a small screen, and it plays almost as well.
The Gameboy version, on the other hand, is a disaster, with slow scrolling, terrible controls and indistinct graphics. Kind of like a shitty RC Pro Am.
And even worse than the Gameboy port, is the Atari Lynx port. It initially looks promising, with chunky, colourful graphics that capture the arcade well. Then it starts moving… jerky scrolling, bad controls and annoying sound make this the very bottom of the bunch. Avoid!
Cool comparison. I didn’t know it could be had so many ways.
I feel like a huge part of the arcade experience was the free spinning steering wheel controller. You just spun it hard and stopped it after your truck made it around the corner. No unwinding of the wheel or anything. As a kid that couldn’t drive, that was the right amount of realism (untealism?).
Agreed!
As a child playing this, I got to be decent at the arcade version (biggest hint is to not use nitros, unless doing so would directly result in winning, because otherwise the computer starts speeding up because of them.), and would happily play for an hour on only a few tokens.
And, yeah, it was fun that steering was, “…and now go spin as fast as possible, and grab onto the steering wheel to stop when the truck has turned the correct direction.”
It wasn’t really accurate, but I liked Super Mario Kart (SNES) and Stunts (PC) for driving things, and a certain amount of unreality was part of what made them fun.
But this post was about the console versions of it, none of which I was able to get into, probably because of it not being like the arcade.
All the same, it’s a bit of a white whale for Lynx, and I’d jump at the chance to own it for any moderately-reasonable price. Even though, obviously, I’d want to own four copies for the one random time when I had enough interested people together in the right place to play the game.
The DOS port of this game was great. The PC really shone in games that didn’t need to scroll.
I never owned a console, but I distinctly remember playing this, so there must have been a PC port some time in the early 90s.
Classic game.
Yeah, I believe there was an MSDOS port, I just didn’t have the set up to play it. From YouTube, it looks similar to the Amiga version.
I enjoy these write ups even when I’m not familiar with the game. Fun stuff!
It’s such a shame we don’t get many modern indie interpretations of these single-screen racers. There’s a clone on Wii U and Switch (and probably other platforms) called Rock 'N Racing Off Road DX which I played to completion even though it was buggier, uglier and less fun than Super Off Road just because I’ve already played SOR so much. The game crashed immediately after the final race and I promptly deleted it.
The last one I know that was really great was Konami’s super underrated Driift Mania for the original Wii. Great handling, fun tracks and colorful visuals made it one of my favorite WiiWare games, which sadly today means you can’t legally get it anywhere. The craziest feature was the 8-way multiplayer using four Wii Remotes and four Classic Controllers, so each player is tethered to another by the Classic Controller cable. Worth tracking down if you want to play a “modern” (14 years old, pff) single-screen racer.
Fantastic write up!
I remember going over to my friends house and playing this game for hours on the SNES, what I always loved about this game were the upgrades. So you could play it for a decent time and it would still be fresh.
Off-road arcade 3 player with the steering wheels was amazing.
Loving these comparisons and trips down memory lane. I had the NES and SNES versions when I was younger.
I really miss local multiplayer fun these classic consoles provided.
IMO the main feature of this arcade game was those frictionless steering wheels. As a kid I would play with them even with no quarter.
Great write up! I only played the SNES version, but it looks like I enjoyed the best one.
Nice write up!! Would lime to read more of these.
Thanks for this! Great job. This game and super sprint were great in the arcades with the wheels, spin at max rpms and stop when done turn. Avoide hitting self in nuts lol
Oh wow this is unlocking some childhood memories, I used to play this on the Amiga. What a blast.
Rented this enough on the SNES to pay for it many times over. A childhood favorite.
I played the fullsize Super Off Road this Friday at our local barcade.
It is generally fun mayhem, but sometimes a frustrating airborne collision will set you back half a lap. Easy to win 6-8 races on 1 credit(was probably on lowest difficulty) .
I still prefer Championship Sprint overall, for the precise control, full slide turns and the shortcut jumps. (Plus laying down awesome donuts by constantly spinning the wheel)
- Special mention to Badlands which adds guns and an apocalyptic theme.
Or the original Sprint series that had no speed-limiter, which made for hilarious out of control death drifting.
Similar top quality games on home computer were:
Supercars II on the Amiga, top multiplayer action.
and
Slicks ‘n’ Slide for DOS. 3-4 player on a single keyboard with excellent drift physics, just brilliant!
Wasn’t there a DOS version later? Or maybe I’m confusing it with a similar game? I remember playing to death a game like this on DOS a long time ago but I completely forgot how it was called.
I linked in Slick ‘n’ Slide in this thread. It was an excellent similar game for DOS.