What is Racing Days R?

Mac auto-racing nuts have had a tough time lately. Sierra’s NASCAR and Indy Car Racing were the last games to offer a true racing fix. (Aspyre Media’s Carmageddon is more of a smash-up derby than a race.) Well, dust off those old gloves — Racing Days R is here.

Our previews of Racing Days (Dec/97, p54) and Racing Days R (Mar/98, p90) in PowerPlay didn’t quite capture how very cool this game is. First of all, Racing Days R’s interface is a huge improvement on the beta we played of Bandai’s Racing Days. And the game no longer suffers from poor Japanese translation and inconsistent dialogs and options.

The latter improvement is probably a result of Feral Entertainment’s picking up Racing Days R from the Japanese developers to publish the game in Europe. The company localized the game to British English, French, and German. That’s right, you lucky Quebecois, you can play this game in your native language! Feral is selling the game direct from the UK and should have arrangements with print and online catalogs by the time you read this.

Being a Mac game, Racing Days R has an intuitive, well-thought-out interface. A help screen on the upper right provides contextual information about various options and features (when you’ve mastered the game, you can play an animation in that box instead). On the main screen, you start by tinkering in the game’s virtual garage — the coolest use we’ve seen of QuickTime VR in a game. As you navigate through the garage, you click on designated items to access game functions such as gear calibrations. As you get better at the game, more options are available in the garage. You aren’t even allowed on the second floor until you reach a certain proficiency. Slick!

These gadgets would be sheer gimmickry if the game weren’t great, too. There are only three tracks, but each is stunningly beautiful — rivaling the graphics of games such as San Francisco Rush for Nintendo 64. We loved playing Racing Days R on our Power Mac G3, but you can scale it to any Power Macintosh. The options for changing the visual settings are fairly basic, yet even here the game adds a nice touch: profiles of various Macs via a pop-up. Pick the Mac closest to your own and hit the streets.

But wait, that doesn’t say anything about gameplay! Driving provides the thrill you get from top arcade games. A tutor tells you when to push which pedals, but we’ll give you the gist of what she says: Brake before entering a curve, and accelerate out of a turn. Oh yeah, and you can play online against as many as eight other people.

Tafel, Kathy. (May 1998). Racing Days R. MacAddict. (pg. 50).

Download Racing Days R for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.1

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver