Speed Racer in My Most Dangerous Adventures (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of Accolade's 1994 licensed-based platforming/racing "exertainment" game for the Super Nintendo, Speed Racer in My Most Dangerous Adventures.

Played through on the hard difficulty level.

Speed Racer seemed like such an odd pick for a licensed video game in the mid 1990s. It was the quintessential first exposure to anime for an entire generation of Americans when an English dub of the series first aired on TV in the late sixties - hell, I remember as a kid, before i had seen the reruns, asking my dad what the song was that he'd randomly break out singing as he made breakfast or messed around on the computer. He always got this hilariously crazed look on his face when he'd start, "Here he comes, here comes Speed Racer."

But I feel like that probably makes my point. My dad was in his mid-thirties when this came out, and was far, far from the typical SNES demographic. I was 12 and pretty much sitting dead-center in Nintendo's marketing crosshairs, and without a dad that would randomly break into recitations of Speed Racer's cheesiest dialogue moments, I would have had no idea what it was.

Not that I cared anyway when the game came out. I remember seeing the meh reviews and quickly shuffling on to more interesting articles in my magazines. My adult self once again applauds the wisdom of my younger self. The game is pretty bad, but it's not undeserving of its footnote in SNES history.

The vanilla, standalone version is what I'm playing here. For the sake of variety, the gameplay alternates between being a super choppy, psuedo 3D racing game and a thoroughly mediocre platformer. The game looks okay in still shots, but in the racing stages, the framerate really hobbles what might've otherwise been a fun game. The glitches don't really help - the courses have "shortcuts," but they seem to trip the game up - oftentimes taking one of these detours will result in being dropped from first to fifth or sixth place, and when that happens, all of the cars that supposedly passed you vanish into thin air, leaving it impossible to place third. Since you have to place third or higher to progress, I'm sure you can imagine the frustration that that might cause. The racing portions aren't totally awful - they're nowhere near as poor as the belly-laugh worthy SNES ports of Road Riot 4WD and Race Drivin' - but they fall stupidly short of their potential.

The platformer stages are okay. They aren't awesome, but most of them aren't broken. The snowy mountain, though. Argh. It loves to not spawn the girl you're trying to save, and if that happens, you have to no choice but to die and hope that resetting the stage fixes the problem. Ignoring that, I'd place it along the lines of Cliffhanger on the NES. It's super ropey, but it can be fun once you figure it out. Just remember - don't use any move but your standard kick. The rest of the moves generally leave you wide-open to getting your face caved in. Maybe that's why Speed appears to have a creepy dead eye in some of those cutscenes.

The other version of the game that I alluded to earlier was one released by, of all companies, LifeCycle. It was promoted as "execre-" oh, I mean, "exertainment," and was included on a 2-in-1 cart (along with Mountain Bike Rally, later re-released as Cannondale Cup) designed for use with a particular model LifeCycle exercise bike that connected to the SNES via the system's expansion port. When played using the bike, you power the Mach5 by pedalling your rear-end off. I imagine that that probably made the game much more fun. And more sweaty.

I do wonder, though. Given the apparent similarities between the racing bits in Speed Racer and Mountain Bike Rally, was Speed Racer initially designed with this specific engine to make it compatible with the bike? I mean, it would make sense considering that both were developed by Radical Entertainment... oh yes. The company that bestowed upon the masses such classics as Rocky & Bullwinkle and The Terminator for the NES, and Bebe's Kids for the SNES.

Oof.

And if that was the case, why Speed Racer? Wouldn't something else - maybe something with a bike theme - be a better fit? I mean, LifeCycle and Nintendo had a partnership going on - why not a novelty version of Excitebike? Or, if you were going to license ancient cartoons, why not The Flintstones? The whole concept seems entirely strange to me, but for the right type of person, I could imagine the appeal it might've held back in 1994.

But alas, it is not 1994, and without the gimmick of a hooking it up to a $1000 piece of exercise equipment, I'm not sure if Speed Racer offers a tantalizing enough carrot to make it worth biting in to.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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