Super Off Road (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthough of Tradewest's 1992 arcade-racing game for the Super NES, Super Off Road.

Since the game has no ending, I played until I lost a race, which doesn't happen until well after I had raced all of the unique tracks. At that point I figured I had played long enough.

Super Off Road is a port of Ivan "Ironman" Stewart's Super Off Road, a 1989 arcade game from Leland. How many of you guys remember just how cool that machine was with its three steering wheels mounted on the front? It's an extremely simple game - you and three other trucks race around a series of single-screen tracks filled with obstacles and ramps and spending your winnings on various upgrades for your truck. The top-down view and the controls make it feel like a slightly-modernized sequel to Super Sprint, and since it retains all of Super Sprint's brilliant replayability and addictiveness, that's a very good thing.

Super Off Road does a number of things to update the formula, but I think the most meaningful improvement stems from how the track surface is no longer smooth and paved. The muddy tracks are loaded with ruts, divots, humps, ramps, and water, and they all inject just enough uncertainty into the races to make sure things never become dull - a single bad landing angle or the scraping of a rail can knock you from first-to-last place in the blink of an eye.

To help counter this (and the exceedingly aggressive AI racers), you can carry up to 99 nitro boosts at a time, and these become key to winning consistently. They'll get you out of many a bad situation, but unless you stockpile them, you'll find yourself running out. The AI-controlled trucks' upgrades seem to always match your own truck's upgrades, and they don't get any faster until you do. The beginning races are the perfect time to stock up on the nitros, because once you've upgraded your truck to its top speed, if you happen to run out of nitros, the computer will totally cream you. Of course, you could always just have a buddy join in and work together against the evil silver truck. That's the most fun way to do it.

Especially for a game with graphics almost entirely done in drab shades of brown, Super Off Road looks really good. The trucks' animations are impressive for how well they reflect the surfaces you're driving over, and they lend the game's controls the perfect amount of "weight." The music is also awesome, but the Follin brothers did it, so duh. Of course it's awesome.

And though I always found it odd that the game replaced the Ivan Stewart license with a Toyota one, there's no denying how awesome that menu screen music is.

"I love what you do for me, Toyota!"

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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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