The RACING Games of ... 1992! | Super Mario Kart, Top Gear, F1 Pole Position

Hello readers and gamers,

my rating system has now been used for dozens of games, including racing and fighting games, but I never really felt comfortable using it for those types of games. Why? Because my rating system doesn't really fit those racing/fighting games that well. 10 points locked up for story seems unfair considering what fighters aim for and what fighting game fans want. Same for racing games. While storytelling will be more relevant in these games over the years, those few expections shouldn't really factor in that much. 

In addition, gameplay should weigh much more highly in these sorts of games. In my usual reviews, gameplay and related scores make up 50% of the total score. For these games, I went up to 70%. In addition, there is a different spreadsheet where these games are listed. The scores are simply there to put my rankings into perspective, but a different reason why I don't want these games to be on the main spreadsheet is because these usually, especially later on into the 90s and beyond, get much more in-depth than I can really go into, so my rating will never be of satisfactory depth here.

This is why, for every gaming year, there will be two special editions like this focusing on all Racing and Fighting games of that year. These reviews will not go in-depth, but I will rather go over what these games offer and what I thought about these features. There will also be comparisons made to previous years and certain milestones in these genres will be discussed to get a better idea about how these genres evolved over time. In 1992, the following hardware was used most commonly.

• Game Boy
• SNES 
• Sega Genesis
• NES
• IBM PC
• Macintosh
• Master System
• Game Gear

For this year's Racing games, I found three games that are worth looking at. F1 Pole Position, Top Gear and Super Mario Kart. Let's start with Top Gear.

TOP GEAR

Gameplay: 16/25 | Music/Sound: 3/5 | Graphics/Art Design: 3/5 | Content: 4/5 | Innovation: 3/5 | Playability: 5/5

OVERALL: 34/50 (Good)

Release Date: March 27, 1992

Platforms: SNES

Developer: Gremlin Graphics

Publisher: Kemco

Moby Score: 7.8

Started: June 19, 2023

Finished: June 19, 2023

Beaten: Not Beaten

Playtime: 2.5 hours

The Top Gear series, but especially this first title, was and is incredibly popular in South America. I found out about this pretty quickly when researching the game. What this game's unique selling propositions are would be three-fold. 

First, Top Gear has a fast pace. Not F-Zero fast, but pretty fast. Especially if you're going up and down hills, it can get pretty hectic. Second, it comes with dozens of courses spanning the whole world, from Germany to Brazil, from LA to Tokyo. Is there enough variety to support these 32 total courses? Not quite. Most actually feel very similar, and are distinguished by pretty small additions (obstacles on the course) and length.

The third and final USP is pretty cool. The game adds strategy to races. There is your typical nitro system that is limited to 3 uses per race. There is the selection of one of four cars, which differ in speed, handling and fuel consumption. Finally, fuel consumption itself is a big deal, as you have limited fuel that will get depleted before you finish the race on certain courses that are up to 7 laps long I believe. This means you need to use pit stops and time your visits well, as you will lose ground while you're waiting for your fuel to charge. 

Overall, I appreciated these elements. Adding this feature does mean however that some tracks can take up to 6 minutes though. That's something you might feel one way or the other about in arcade racers, but I enjoyed the shorter levels more, even without pit stops becoming a factor.

One negative I want to mention is that half of the screen is constantly blocked by a split-screen setup that shows a computer racing below you. This is no issue in 2-Player of course, but could have been removed for single player.

In terms of content, the game offers you the four aforementioned cars, the 32 maps and puts these two things together for one single mode, which is a campaign through all maps in the game. You start in the USA and have to finish in a certain spot on the ranking to qualify for the next set of maps. I finished 2nd once and still qualified, so up to half of the game, there was no need to finish 1st yet. Finishing 4th didn't do the job though. 

Finally, the soundtrack is worth a mention. There are some great tracks here, but out of the 4 used for the 32 tracks, I felt indifferent about two, so I felt there wasn't enough variety here and it wasn't an F-Zero situation where I was bopping my head to pretty much all tracks and even listened to some of them outside of the game from time to time. In general, the soundtrack is seen as one of the highlights of this game, so your enjoyment of it may differ. I just found 4 tracks to be too few either way.

Overall, Top Gear is a fun racing game. It doesn't surpass F-Zero as my favorite racing game out of this challenge so far, but it is similarly addictive and I have no hard time figuring out why it's still popular at some parts of the Earth. 

F1 POLE POSITION

Gameplay: 14/25 | Music/Sound: 2/5 | Graphics/Art Design: 2/5 | Content: 4/5 | Innovation: 2/5 | Playability: 5/5

OVERALL: 29/50 (OK)

Release Date: November 20, 1992

Platforms: SNES

Developer: Human Entertainment

Publisher: Human Entertainment (JP) / Ubi Soft (EU/NA)

Moby Score: 7.7

Started: June 20, 2023

Finished: June 20, 2023

Beaten: Not Beaten

Playtime: 2.5 hours

I'm not a Formula One guy, but I did recognize some of the names of the other drivers, so I can start of by saying that those seem authentic as a whole. If you wanted to race against those F1 names from the early 90s, then well, this is one of a dozen options for you, and probably not the best one. Is it a good game regardless? Eh, it's OK.

This is the first in a series of F1 games we'll see in this review segment. This means I don't have much to compare it to. This is also a sim racer, not an arcade one, so it's hard to compare to Top Gear and especially F-Zero as well. But it can easily be compared in terms of graphics and music/sound, and in both these cateogries, F1 Pole Position is not good. 

Graphically, there is little detail to environments and backgrounds, and the sprites of the cars don't look good either. Additionally, the sense of scale on the enemy cars is seemingly random. When they show up, they'll start small, then look gigantic all of a sudden, then look appropriate, then tiny, then gigantic, then appropriate in size again. It's odd.

There isn't much music here, just a few tunes to have you entertained when scrolling the menus. The sound of the engines is what you will hear mainly, and it sounds pretty bad. 

What does this game offer in terms of content? Quite a few things actually. There are 16 maps total and a Grand Prix mode to go through them. You can also battle as many drivers individually as you want in singular races, and do practice runs. There is also a whole lot of customization you can do to one of many cars you can select. Choose if gear should be shifted manually or automatically, whether you need slick or rain tires, what kind of gear you want (short gear ratios mean faster accel but lower max speed and vice versa) and you can adjust your brake level from soft all the way to hard, among multiple other options. Pretty nice.

During races, there is additional strategy involved, as you need to watch 5 indicators. WIN shows if a wing is damaged, which would reduce speed. TIR is about wear on your tires. SUS is about your car suspension, which can reduce traction. BRA goes down the more you use your brakes and reduces effectiveness. GER reduces your control of the car, if your gear box gets damaged. You can reset these meters through pit stops. So careful driving and well-timed use of pit stops is pretty important to do well. 

The controls are fine, you will have seen worse and better. The fact that this is a sim racer means the devs try to make controls more grounded, with which they've done an OK job. My biggest gripe was you hitting other cars or getting hit from the back yourself, which puts you, and only you, in a spinning animation, sometimes even leading you off-track. That seemed pretty annoying considering controls are not tight enough to avoid these most of the time. 

All in all, I don't think many people are looking for sim racers of the early 90s to play, so this is skippable, but a serviceable game for its time. F1 fans will have had fun with it, but will be better served with later racing games than this. 

SUPER MARIO KART

Gameplay: 17/25 | Music/Sound: 4/5 | Graphics/Art Design: 4/5 | Content: 4/5 | Innovation: 5/5 | Playability: 5/5

OVERALL: 39/50 (VERY GOOD)

Release Date: August 27, 1992

Platforms: SNES

Developer: Nintendo EAD

Publisher: Nintendo

Moby Score: 8.3

Started: June 21, 2023

Finished: June 22, 2023

Beaten: Beaten

Playtime: 4 hours

I was looking forward to this one for a while. My history with the Mario kart series is pretty short actually, as I have only ever played Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on the Switch. I love that game though and couldn't wait to discover the origins of the series. Having done that, I'm happy to say that Super Mario Kart still offers a fun time and offers lots of content to go through both in single- and multiplayer.

It's not perfect. There isn't a lot to complain about here, but the main thing I've noticed somewhat negatively is the controls. The game controls reasonably well for its time, and certainly not worse than its contemporaries (I'd give the edge to F-Zero though) but it quite often felt like the CPU had an edge over the player in handling, especially when it comes to turning corners. The drift mechanic exists in this game. Press the shoulder buttons, and your character's kart will jump up and start to drift. Unfortunately, I never really got comfortable with this. It felt pretty random as to how successful the drift is and how quickly I could regather control of the kart, as a lot of the time, the kart would just drift way further than anticipated and take an extra second of sliding before it would drive forward again. I could say I'm spoiled from modern Mario Kart, but truthfully, I just found this mechanic to not be useful a lot of the time. I'm sure I would have figured it out by playing more, but it certainly is not something I would describe as intuitive.

That said, I don't really have any more major complaints, let alone of medium importance. This game was plenty of fun. You can choose one of 8 characters in the Mario franchise, from Mario himself to Donkey Kong Jr. Each character has their own stats for speed, acceleration and handling, but those stats are only shown in the manual I believe. Karts cannot be changed and don't add bonuses/penalties. 

There are two singleplayer modes. The Grand Prix mode, where you can choose between 50cc and 100cc difficulties and take on three cups with 5 unique tracks each. If you win them all on 100cc, you unlock a fourth cup that includes the iconic Rainbow Road that is still in Mario Kart games to this day. If you conquer that as well, you unlock the 150cc difficulty mode. The other singleplayer mode is called Time Trial, where you simply choose a track and try to beat your best time.

For multiplayer (2P), two new modes are Match Race, where you go head-to-head with no CPU opponents, and Battle Mode, where you need to pop the there balloons on top of your opponent before your balloons are popped.  

So as you can tell, there is quite a lot of content here. No customization, but 8 characters, 20 maps, 3 difficulty modes and 5 game modes. 

The music is immediately recognizable if you played future Mario Kart games, so it's nice to see that the atmosphere they're going for hasn't changed since the original entry. Tracks are very varied and cleverly designed with many different types of obstacles and challenges. In general, the presentation is just charming.

The game is the 4th best selling game for the SNES. It's not hard to see why. Unlike action/adventure/platforming games, racing and fighting titles usually have a hard time to be recommendable for play in modern times since pretty much everything is improved upon in newer titles, whereas the story and certain gameplay elements of single-player games are much harder to replicate and therefore rate more favorably in that regard. I'd say the same applies for Super Mario Kart. It is still fun, it's an iconic and revolutionary game that popularized the kart racing genre, but I have a hard time arguing for why you would play this instead of the most recent Mario Kart games.

And this is it for this year's Racing games! The most notable racers in 1992 released for the SNES exclusively, as you can see, and there was some good variety and two pretty iconic games in the batch. Ultimately, all games stood out in one way or the other. F1 Poleds Position is the sim racer of the bunch with plenty of customization options and real-life drivers to add immersion. Top Gear is the ultra-popular (in South America) arcade racer and Super Mario Kart is the fun, Kart racer that pioneered an entire genre. Pretty good year for the genre. 

In 1993, we can look forward to two sequels in Top Gear 2 and F1 Pole Position 2, plus Rock n' Roll Racing. All three of these released for the SNES initially. One final game, another Formula 1 game called simply 'F1', that released for the Amiga and Genesis, will wrap things up. See you for this in next year's post. Thank you for reading!