Days of Thunder

So I just bought a car.  I may not be the first one of my friends to own a minivan, but I'm damn sure the first one to own a minivan of my own free will!  I figured now was a good time to check another genre off the list.  One I have been dreading for a long time.  

I really, really don’t like racing games.  At least, realistic ones.  I like my share of kart racers and more sci-if oriented racers, like F-Zero, but that’s about it.  I have just never been a car enthusiast (I just bought a minivan for crying out loud) and I can count on one hand the ones I think are actually fun.  Everyone always talks about Gran Turismo or Forza or whatever, how they accurately simulate driving.  Great!  Who doesn’t love driving!  While we're at it, lets make games that accurately simulate squirting lemon juice in your eye or getting kicked in the nuts! 

 

So as it is, there’s some genre bias here, but I am always willing to give new games a chance.  Especially when they are random NES games based on lousy Tom Cruise movies from the 80s...oh lord this is going to be bad isn’t it.  

Genre bias aside, Days of Thunder is a straight up terrible game.  It can be hard to really get into detail about NES games because they just aren’t that involved (It really is shocking to see the jump in depth between the 8 and 16-bit generations).  So when what content there is is terrible, you are doomed from the start.  

I will start with the positive, as in, the one singular positive.  The scrolling effect is pretty good.  Graphically that aspect of the game was well ahead of its time and was top of the line for the NES.  The rest of the graphics are fine for their time and uh... they graphics are OK?

As for everything else, well, ugh.  Just ugh.  The control is terrible.  At no point did I ever feel like I had any sort of control.  If you don’t go slow, you careen out of control and crash into the walls.  If you do go slow, the computer blows by you.  The AI is just relentless, one slip up and they all leave you in the dust.  You can maybe catch up to one or two, but you won’t ever finish higher than 5th or 6th.  You don’t have to win every race and its a good thing too, because winning is almost impossible.  Challenge is okay, but when you have to practice extensively just to finish 2nd on the first course of a racing game from 1990, its too much,

When you pop the game in, you get a title, brief cutscene and then the racing starts.  Normally, this would be okay in a racing game.  They are best when you can just pick them up and play.  The problem here is you will eventually run out of fuel.  It kept happening to me and happening to me and I had no Idea what was going on.  After about 20 minutes and some really choice words, I was ready to give up.  I laid on the buttons out of frustration, sending my car crashing towards the infield.  I was shocked to see the camera shift.  After trying a couple more times, I realized that this was my car driving onto pit row.  Would have been nice to know I was able to do that since its a critical part of playing the game and all!

The shame of it all is I actually like the idea of having to hit the pits for tires and gas.  It adds something to a game, and a genre as a whole, that’s one note and monotonous.  But it just isn’t done well at all.  For one, you have to be really precise to actually get the car to stop.  You have to be going slow enough and as we already covered, you can’t slow down for a second.  Then there is the matter of actually controlling your pit crew.  I had to look it up on the internet, as the game doesn’t actually tell you how.  I am sure it was in the instruction booklet, but still.

At the end of the day, the game is bland, dull and monotonous.  The control is horrible, the sound is awful and the difficulty is insane.  The tracks and all the cars are the same and the game only has eight levels, two of which I never saw because the game is damn near impossible.  There is no variety, no balance and nothing of value.  Don’t waste your time.

2/10

Play this game if:

You are an absolutely die hard racing game fan

You are the president of the Tom Cruise fan club

You like cars and stuff

Avoid if:

You like games with variety, any variety at all

You don’t have time to waste

You would prefer to spend your gaming hours playing games that don’t suck