Hard Driving just plain impossible.....

[RickHarrisMaine]

What the heck were these people at Atari smoking when they made this game? I find this thing impossible to play, and pretty ugly to look at....I don't get it, Stun Runner looks great in comparison, so do other games......this looks like crap!

[Emehr]

I thought the visuals were pretty good considering what the Lynx is doing (filled polygons), even if the frame rate is chopperific. The controls kill it though. I find that tapping left and right on the D-pad helps a little. I loved the arcade game and until Midway Arcade Treasures 2 came out the Lynx version was my only outlet to playing this game.

[Clint Thompson]

Being one of the only games I had for my lynx (out of 4, at the time) I played this game 2nd most. Choices being: Ninja Gaiden (1st), NFL Football (3rd) and Batman Returns (4th).

 

I thought the same thing when I first played it... but kept having go after go on it and finally I was getting somewhere! It's a hard learning curve.... and it was still pretty cool for the time.

[legeek]

I dunno I got pretty good at it after a while. Play the speed track first. BTW the import Saturn version of Race Drivin' is great and it supports the SEGA driving controller!

 

Cheers,

Ben

[Flojomojo]

My favorite port of Hard Drivin's is for the Sega Genesis. STUN Runner and Checkered Flag are great on Lynx, but HD is just too much for the poor little handheld.

 

I disagree with legeek -- the Saturn take on Race Drivin' is trash, whether or not it supports the driving wheel. IMHO of course.

[+remowilliams]

What the heck were these people at Atari smoking when they made this game?

You need to look at it with a little perspective The fact that the Lynx has a version at all is pretty amazing. When Hard Drivin' hit the arcades, it had an insane amount of processing power inside of it, outclassing the poor little Lynx by several magnitudes. While the port certainly isn't perfect, it is pretty good, and with a little practice you can get around the tracks well.

 

I remember being hugely disappointed with the Saturn version, which was especially disappointing as the Saturn had so many killer versions of my favorite arcade games. Though its been a while, I'd have to dig it out to actually remember what I didn't like

 

Until Midway Arcade Treasures 2, the Genesis definitely had the best version of Hard Drivin' Though the Xbox version of MAT2 was destroyed by awful controls, I play it on my GC all the time. I love Hard Drivin' and Race Drivin' they're in my 'top game' list

[The_Laird]

Very good game IMHO. It not only does full 3D polygons but also smoothly (thanks to the scaling chip) and with action replays too! I have completed it (both courses) many times.

[JagFan422]

everything atari put out is good to you. your fanboyness is worse than even some ninty fanboys and nobody on these boards should take your opinion seriously.

[The_Laird]

everything atari put out is good to you. your fanboyness is worse than even some ninty fanboys and nobody on these boards should take your opinion seriously.

 

Thankfully its very well known that you know absolutly nothing so they are likely to ignore you first . . . .

 

[SwedenLynxer]

I think most people will find this game very hard and frustrating at first, but I agree, just hang in there...keep playing it...and you will find it more easy and fun after a while. The controls could have been better though.

[Atariman]

everything atari put out is good to you. your fanboyness is worse than even some ninty fanboys and nobody on these boards should take your opinion seriously.

 

Oh, please - if there ever was a safe haven for "Atari fanboys" this should be the place - quit bitching and let somebody praise a game if they want to.

[Bill Brasky]

The arcade version was impossible too, so I guess Atari got it right on the Lynx.

[+madman]

I also gave up on that game, I thought the graphics and control were terrible. Too bad a version of Stunts never came out on the Lynx, that was a great game.

[Flojomojo]

Very good game IMHO. It not only does full 3D polygons but also smoothly (thanks to the scaling chip) and with action replays too! I have completed it (both courses) many times.

The Lynx's hardware scaling features are for 2D, a la Mode 7 on SNES. They had nothing to do with the boxy 3D polygon graphics on the Lynx, which would be just as slow without them.

[Video]

Never tried this for the Lynx (first I've heard of it though) But I did have the game for teh Genny and the SNES, and it was pretty choppy on those too. It's made of large untextured polys, which the lynx can handle, and it uses a relatively low number. But for some reason, it was still choppy as hell. It did seem to run the best on the SNES though, of the versions I played (saturn?)

 

I don't know, how choppy it is for the lynx, but it's a pretty chopy game anyways. Check out Steel Talons sometime, it's a low poly count untextured game too, and I thought it was done quiet well, though it is a different type of game.

[The_Laird]

Very good game IMHO. It not only does full 3D polygons but also smoothly (thanks to the scaling chip) and with action replays too! I have completed it (both courses) many times.

The Lynx's hardware scaling features are for 2D, a la Mode 7 on SNES. They had nothing to do with the boxy 3D polygon graphics on the Lynx, which would be just as slow without them.

 

Rubbish! STUN Runner uses the scaling chip to achieve its speed and so does Steel Talons for its smoothness. According to the Lynx designers the machine can scale any object which includes sprites (something the lame SNES could not do)

[Crazy Climber]

i DIDN'T CARE FOR IT MYSELF BUT THEN AGAIN i DIDN'T LIKE THE cOIN-OP EITHER

OOPS I HAD THE CAPS LOCK ON, OH WELL

[Crazy Climber]

I just remembered I sold this one to you...sorry you didn't like it man

But hey for $2.50 you can't go wrong

[Flojomojo]

Very good game IMHO. It not only does full 3D polygons but also smoothly (thanks to the scaling chip) and with action replays too! I have completed it (both courses) many times.

The Lynx's hardware scaling features are for 2D, a la Mode 7 on SNES. They had nothing to do with the boxy 3D polygon graphics on the Lynx, which would be just as slow without them.

 

Rubbish! STUN Runner uses the scaling chip to achieve its speed and so does Steel Talons for its smoothness. According to the Lynx designers the machine can scale any object which includes sprites (something the lame SNES could not do)

Rubbish yourself. 2D scaling, as seen in STUN Runner (which is fast and great), is not the same thing as 3D polygons, as seen in Hard Drivin' and Steel Talons (which are slow and relatively lame).

[rjchamp3]

The game is ugly but not impossible to play I hold the world record on snes default mode, but I prob could play it forever its just memorizing the lap pattern and not making a single mistake

[FastRobPlus]

If you ever read Retro Gamer, there's a comparison of Hard Drivin' conversionas across several 8 and 16-bit consoles and platforms of the time.

 

Be thankful you didn't shell out full price for the Spectrum ZX port!

[rjchamp3]

I know what you mean

[RickHarrisMaine]

I just remembered I sold this one to you...sorry you didn't like it man

But hey for $2.50 you can't go wrong

 

 

I really shuold have posted earlier that my original posting was kind of tongue in cheek. I'm still playing it, and getting a bit better at it too. I remember being blown away by this game in the arcade, so I'm not surprised with the limitations to the Lynx. I think you just have to look at this not as Hard Drivin' but as something all its own, kind of the way you have to look at Zaxon for the 2600. Once you get past the idea that it's not the same, its not bad to play.

 

But don't worry, I'm having a blast on all of the games you sold me. Looking at the reviews of some of the games surprised me though. these are the ones on www.videogamecritic.com. I like Block-Out way more than they did!

Edited January 17, 2007 by RickHarrisMaine

[Songbird]

2D scaling, as seen in STUN Runner (which is fast and great), is not the same thing as 3D polygons, as seen in Hard Drivin' and Steel Talons (which are slow and relatively lame).

You're correct in that STUN Runner, which was a true polygon game in the arcade, is wicked fast because they chose to simulate polygons in the Lynx port using 2D sprite scaling, at which the Lynx is very proficient. Hard Drivin' and Steel Talons chose to implement polygons instead in their Lynx ports.

 

However, all the games use the scaling engine on the Lynx. The CPU has to do more computations in 3D vs. 2D, thus the true polygon games are signficantly slower on the Lynx.

[Epicenter]

Since this game runs on so many systems (e.g. MD/Genesis, SNES ... Lynx too?!) I think it must be written in C. No way they'd rewrite the whole thing for different CPU architectures in ASM. This might explain why it's so damn sluggish considering what it's doing (software 3D.) Sure, you can write an extremely fast game in C for such a processor. But first the developers need to know what they're doing. I don't think these did.

 

Although arguably the CPU-bound portions of it (e.g. not accessing any machine specific registers) would likely run on the SNES' 6502 based CPU as well as the Lynx's without much modification...

Edited January 17, 2007 by Epicenter