Road Rash: Survival, Chance, and the End of an Era

Introduction

There you were, barreling down the hot Arizona highway at 150 miles per hour on your Shuriken TT 250 sports bike. You blow past a cop, who flips on the sirens and gives chase. Gunning the engine, you skid around the turn, tires biting into the pavement. Up ahead you see a rival. As you draw near, he lands the first hit with a billy club. But you're ready for the next one-- he raises the club to strike, but you quickly grab it. You exchange blows. As both bikes round the next bend, you see an oncoming car closing in fast. Split second decision. You swing around it just in time. He doesn't. You smile as you see him fly over the hood of the car in your rear view mirror. One less Rasher.

This is a typical scenario in Road Rash II, a game which excels at creating exciting and chaotic scenarios not entirely unlike those of Grand Theft Auto. Though, as we'll see, these unpredictable situations are often at the cost of gameplay precision.

The Good

Road Rash II

You were also introduced to a cast of characters, each with their own personalities. You've got Biff, the preppy 80s guy who claims to play fair, like a real sportsman (somehow I don't quite believe him; and I bet he listens to Huey Lewis inside that helmet). Then there's Slater the skater, permanently wearing a smirk. And Natasha, who's generally cool to you and will give you tips.

Between the stages you get neat graphics: The first Road Rash features still images of your biker hanging outside of a bar, having a campfire with the other Rashers, or on the beach under an orange sunset. And in Road Rash II, you get cute animations after each race instead. It's a little less evocative, but I'll take it. There's something about the zoomed-out-yet-detailed graphics style of these that makes me think of Deluxe Paint II creations. These are minor but welcome additions, much like the pun-laden gas stations between levels in Test Drive II: The Duel, and really helps to give the game personality.

Grabbing a brew in the original Road Rash

Between races in Road Rash II

Parked outside of "Davidson's Gas and
Juggling Supplies" in Test Drive II (Amiga)

All of this lends Road Rash the very specific charm of an 80s American computer game, a style that seemingly vanished in gaming some time during the Extreme 1990s (I'm looking at you, Skitchin'). Fortunately, Road Rash II carries on the tradition.

But it doesn't stop at superficialities. For example, the other riders don't just have their own sayings and personalities between races-- many drive differently during the races, too. Take Slater, who gets his swerve on, or Public Enemy No. One, who will go after you with a vengeance. The game shows you the name of the closest biker, so you can make smart decisions on whether you want to engage them or not. The same bikers also seem to carry weapons or not each race, which you can steal if you time your punch correctly. The AI is smart, clustering in realistic formations, and will usually drop back if their health bar gets too low, then ride up on you again after they recover. Sometimes if you know the rival character is tough, you'll just want to kick their bike to get them away from you instead of fighting them at all. And, yes, you can kick their bikes into cars, though you don't seem to be able to kick them into off-road obstacles (this would have made it too easy I suppose).

Yep, Road Rash was violent, but was strangely cheerful and cartoony about it. It was never too serious: This is a world where you can crash a bike at 150 MPH into a tree, brush yourself off, and keep on riding. Nobody ever dies in Road Rash's universe. Even still, it had a rebellious streak, letting the player beat up motorcycle cops well before Grand Theft Auto. Hey, it's either that or get busted, right?

Wreck at 150MPH? Just shake it off!

And it wasn't just the characters who had their own personalities: Each bike you can buy in the game handles very differently, to the point where I'd say if you buy a new bike, prepare to lose a couple races getting used to it. This speaks well of the physics engine: Not only did the bikes control differently in terms of weight, cornering, acceleration, or the addition of nitro, but you really could feel the tires slipping and regaining traction. When your bike goes airborne, then comes down and hits the pavement, the bike does what you expect: Come down at the right angle, and it jerks in the direction of the tilt as the wheels hit the ground with a quick skid. Angle too much, and you'll fly off your bike. This is quite a feat for a game engine that's more OutRun than it is Revs.

The bikes come in three categories: Ultra Light, which are fast and corner quickly, but the lower-end ones are easy to lose control of on a tight turn, and can sometimes be kicked out from under you by an opponent. Nitro Class, which have mid-range handling and a lower top speed, but are nitro-injected. And Super Bikes, which are weighty but powerful speed demons. They're harder to lose control of, but will oversteer a lot more. One class of bike isn't necessarily better than another, so it's often up to player preference which one to choose.

One interesting thing about Road Rash in general is that it's an exercise in selective attention. Have you seen the video where the viewer is asked to count how many times a basketball is passed? If you haven't seen it, watch this first.

OK, spoiler time. The video has a few people passing a basketball. And they pass it in a way that, if you only watch the ball, you miss someone in a gorilla suit who waltzes into the frame, waves at the camera, and keeps on walking.

Road Rash is that in videogame form. It is extremely easy to zone out on the course or other cars when engaged in combat. Sometimes you'll be slugging it out, and BAM! One (or both!) participants are nailed by a car, or a quick turn in the road. It asks the player to walk, chew gum, and juggle all at the same time.

How to Play Road Rash

Road Rash II has five courses: Alaska, Hawaii, Tennessee, Arizona, and Vermont. Arizona has long stretches of straight hilly road. Hawaii has massive hills and long curves. Tennessee and Vermont are medium difficulty but otherwise unremarkable. And Alaska will kill you. This is the hardest course in the game, full of turns that will whip you off your bike, and it's presented to the player as the first level. Come on, guys, you can do better than to put the trickiest track first! It even says it's the hardest course right there in the description!

Luckily, you can play these courses in any order you choose. Once you beat all five, you go up a level. This gives your rivals better bikes, and the courses are the same, but longer. Since the roads don't have very many distinct features (it's all just two-lane open highway), this isn't a huge issue. The longer courses offer more cops, more cars, and more obstacles such as deer standing in the road, sleeping cows that moo as your bike jumps over them, or construction zone signs that'll throw you right off. The longer courses also tend to throw in more severe curves and hills as they go on. And since you'll need a faster bike to compete, previously-innocuous curves are now deadly. This is because the bike's handling is not proportional to its top speed, but generally proportional to its current speed. The slower bikes allow the player to pretty much floor it the entire way through the level, where the faster bikes often need you to take the speed down as you take a sharp curve.

The hills in Road Rash are significant, too, as they can hide traffic in their valleys or launch your bike high into the air if the crest is taken too fast. One skill in Road Rash you'll have to master is observation: As you approach the top of a hill, you can see if there's any traffic coming. If you don't know what's ahead, the safest place is the center line, because you can navigate through traffic. The right lane is more dangerous because it contains slow traffic moving your direction. And the left lane contains oncoming traffic and is even more likely to have other stationary objects to hit. There are also intersections with cross-traffic that may have a car stopped halfway into one lane or the other, and also provide further opportunities for your rivals to wipe out.

Each time you cross the finish line, you will get some sum of money depending on how you ranked. This can be invested into better bikes. But there are a few ways to lose the race entirely: Getting busted (costs some money), or wrecking your bike (the bike's hitbar is depleted. This costs even more of your hard-earned cash). When you're out of cash and can't pay for a ticket or a new bike, it's game over. Keep this in mind when blowing all your dough on a shiny new cycle.

The Random

So, this sounds pretty great so far. But Road Rash II is not without some flaws. Some are superficial, like a buggy music engine. But there are several issues which affect gameplay.

The most immediately noticeable problem is the frame rate. Now, I should point out that Road Rash has an impressive graphics engines that feature a polygonal ground and realtime scaling effects on a lowly 7MHz 68000 processor (for you kids, that's under 0.8% as many Hz as your old iPhone).

And it runs about as you might expect: Somewhere around 10 frames-per-second and dropping (but as a side-note, the Sega Master System port appears to run faster, albeit without the realtime scaling but retaining the 3d ground-- a feat! It makes you wonder how the Genesis version could have handled had the coding been tighter).

Now, the slow framerate isn't necessarily a problem, but in a fast-paced game like Road Rash it can be. There are scenarios where your bike goes from in-control to being knocked off within one frame, leading sometimes to a "what hit me?" feel. This happens especially with the light bikes.

The combat, in general, feels like The Last Ninja on motorcycles: Sometimes you hit them, sometimes they hit you, sometimes they kick your bike halfway across the screen and into a tree in a period of just one frame. It's like an action game equivalent of one of those RPGs where you open a chest, are paralyzed because it's booby-trapped, and in the next turn are eaten by a bear.

Overall, it's very clunky and the control for precise timing just isn't there, in part because throwing a punch or a kick takes a few frames. You feel like you're vaguely conducting combat: you're not controlling your character as much as offering micro-managed suggestions on how to fight. And often times you're within punching distance, you tap to move closer, but instead of a punch connecting, your bikes collide (don't worry, you don't fly off if that happens, it's just anticlimactic). I can't help but think that if the framerate were higher that you'd be able to see more of these hazards coming and be able to react appropriately.

Other randomness issues come from the collisions and the cops. When you crash your bike, both you and your bike travel an unspecified distance, depending on terrain and objects. Sometimes you get lucky and come to rest right next to your bike. Other times, it's a 10 second or more jog back to your motorcycle. Sometimes the bike comes to rest in the middle of the road, you're almost back to it, and then a car comes and knocks it further down the road in the opposite direction. Tough luck, brah. At least the game lets you steer your rider on-foot so you don't get nailed by traffic (unless you're not paying attention).

But even worse, it's often hard to know if you're being tailed by a cop, especially in the earlier levels where your bike is slower. This is as opposed to the earlier Test Drive, where it is perfectly clear when there's a cop around. And, in the later levels (level 4, for example), I've had many instances where I fly off my bike only to fly right past a parked cop who hadn't scrolled onto the screen yet at the moment of the crash. Busted.

Other times, I should have been busted only to see the cop stopped up ahead. Maybe he was arresting another Rasher-- or that's what I wanted to think (wouldn't that have been a rewarding gameplay mechanic?). However, I tried getting ahead of the cop and knocking someone off their bike. But, that didn't seem to trigger the behavior. This is not something that's mentioned in any of the manuals or FAQs, and so I have to assume it's some kind of glitch perhaps having to do with giving different cops zones where they're active. After all, I saw this the most in stages with densely placed cops.

But I don't mean to imply that Road Rash is a random, glitchy, wholly unpredictable mash-fest. Without skill, you will lose 100% of the time. On the higher levels, it'll have you furiously (but delicately) tapping the d-pad, brakes and accelerator in order to stay on course. Still, it could have been a tighter game, and for this, Road Rash represents something of a missed opportunity.

How Road Rash Copes

But with all the previously-mentioned randomness in play, how can you possibly win consistently? Well, you don't. Road Rash is a game of probability. When you make decisions in Road Rash, you make them to minimize the probability of something terrible happening to your rider: You try to split the lane because you don't know what's coming over the hill. At some points, you may need to swing out into the oncoming lane to avoid obstacles, knowing full well that you could be nailed by a car you won't have time to react to. You might decide not to fight a cop, instead betting that you won't crash in the next couple miles. You weigh factors such as how long it'd take to catch back up to the pack after defeating the cop, how fragile your bike's handling is, and others.

The amount of chance in play also appears proportional to how good your bike is in relation to the other riders, mostly because a lot of the loss of control has to do with interacting with your rivals. When you start a new level, you will spend time being tossed around. If you have certain lighter bikes, you're probably best off avoiding conflict as much as possible.

But a crash is not the end: Though you would think that spending 10 seconds jogging back to your bike would lead to your losing the race, it smartly lets you catch back up fairly easily. There seems to be a great deal of rubber banding in play, but it seems to work to the player's advantage.

The chance-heavy gameplay extends to the long game: how you earn money from races and use that to upgrade bikes. In a lot of games, you'd expect that if you don't qualify that you don't get cash. But in Road Rash, you always get money as long as you make it to the end of the race. In later levels, it can be a significant amount for even 8th place. This ensures that you can always upgrade to an acceptable bike even if you started the level with a dog, which generally happens if you don't grind, even if you don't lose too much money during the series. And there is definitely a grind aspect to Road Rash-- you can always upgrade to a better bike, though in some cases that may mean ranking badly over, and over, and over.

The game also allows players to milk a level before proceeding to the next because it never stops you from re-racing a course you've already qualified on. To some degree, this is necessary because it prevents the player from an unrecoverable situation after paying for tickets and wrecks. But it also means that you can potentially leave the first level with the best bike in the game, as long as you're willing to put in the time.

I wish the game were less about working your way up through a level by buying new equipment and more about just playing well. But for that to happen, the gameplay would need to be more predictable than it is, which admittedly is part of the thrill of Road Rash ("oh man, I can't believe I bounced off that cow, came down, narrowly missed that tree, but then plowed head first into the back of that car!"). The game would also need to let the player start a level with a competitive bike without grinding, instead of the current progression where levels tend to go from hard near the beginning to easy after the player upgrades.

Save States

Another thing Road Rash offers besides a lenient cash system are save states. It uses a password system, so the player can jot down as many as they want. Now, taken by itself, there's nothing wrong with this. Lots of games have save states. But I would argue that Road Rash might not be terribly playable if, say, you only had one save slot: It's possible to get into situations that make it extremely difficult to advance.

Save States also let you experiment with different bikes without having to build up your savings all over each time. Now, I would argue that a better way of doing it would be that the bike doesn't lose much trade-in value, and maybe different classes of bikes are just spaced farther apart price-wise. But in Road Rash, when you buy a bike, most of its value is gone after you exit the store. This is realistic, but it means that if you just bought a bike you don't like, you have to back up from a password to grab something else instead. And some bikes are better suited for certain tracks than others. It would have been great to let the player easily swap bikes and experiment, or at least tune the bikes to their liking. Ideally, bikes would just be slightly cheaper and you'd have a garage, but this would likely not fit into their 8-character password save system.

Of course, like with any flexible save system, it allows a player to brute-force their way through the game, neurotically jotting down passwords every chance, and restoring if something doesn't go quite their way. In my experience, this makes a game tedious. As a player, it's easy to slip into this habit when the designers give you the opportunity. And, to some degree, including a save system like this is almost an admission that the game balance isn't quite all there.

How enjoyable would Road Rash have been if there had only been a single save slot? Would the minor frustrations-- the bad turns of luck-- turn into major frustrations? Are some games only “fair” because they lean on their save system? There is a lot to be said for limiting a player's saved games.

The End of an Era

Road Rash is a transitional game. It comes on the tail-end of the 80s computer game era (and I say computer game and not console game because EA was transitioning out of computer game development). It's one part 80s oldschool charm, one part 90s extreme sports and soon-to-be-played-out "twisted" humor. It also comes at the end of Electronic Arts as the individualistic bedroom programmer-promoting computer game company and the beginning of EA as a soulless console juggernaut. Road Rash as a series started life with hand-pixeled graphics, and an original soundtrack with Rob Hubbard involvement that-- like many old computer game soundtracks-- is based on a previous generation's idea of rock n' roll: This isn't Nirvana, Metallica, or Alice in Chains. It's Nazareth. It's Foghat. It doesn't shred, and there's nothing punk about it. Instead, it boogies.

Then there's the question of just what kind of motorcycle gang this Fight Club on Wheels is. These aren't the Hell's Angels. This gang has a diverse assortment of personalities, many of them seemingly un-bikerly. Not only that, but they're not riding Harleys, they're riding Japanese sports bikes. I can only assume that the creators just thought these were cool elements and didn't set out to clone existing culture- they were too busy making something new. And, I think this is one thing that makes videogames a unique artform: Their ability to not reflect reality; their ability to not just be movies.

Yes, the art of Road Rash is quirky. But, by the mid-90s release on 3do, Saturn and Playstation, it had traded all of that for trendy and painful full-motion cutscenes, now-dated hip art, and a licensed soundtrack with big-name bands like Soundgarden. This was it: The beginning of console games not as the vision of those individuals involved, but the vision of a bunch of test-marketers. In later releases, the Road Rash gang even traded their sports bikes for Harleys!

But when playing the first two Road Rash games, you can tell: This is the Electronic Arts that made it known who developed their games, and shipped their computer games in gatefold covers like a good vinyl record album. It's the Electronic Arts whose games came with photos of the development crew dressed up in appropriate garb depending on the theme of the game. Maybe this is reading too much into a product like Road Rash, but it seems like a labor of love.