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Friday Flashback: Rock n’ Roll Racing

Take the isometric perspective of Super Off-Road, the cutthroat weapons-based combat of Mario Kart and Wipeout, and the most hilariously "extreme" 90's style of Rob Liefeld's worst nightmares and you have Rock n' Roll Racing, one of the best games to come from Blizzard before it was even called Blizzard.

Yes, this utterly rad SNES and Sega Genesis racer (not to be confused with the much less rad Rad Racer) was made by Silicon & Synapse, the developers that would eventually become Blizzard Entertainment. You select from six racers (seven if you input a special code to play as Olaf from The Lost Vikings) and crash your way around a wide variety of track-filled planets. There's a fire planet, an ice planet, a desert planet, and a creepy dark black light planet, all with their own hazard-filled tracks and menacing AI "villains."

It plays a lot like Super Off-Road. Isometric view, winding tracks filled with pits and traps, and plenty of opportunities to screw up and fall too far behind to have any hope of winning. This time around you have things like missiles and mines to trip up your enemies, so you can even the playing field with generous amounts of violence.

Like in Super Off-Road, you earn money and upgrade your vehicles between races. You start with a basic buggy, but you can get monster trucks, hovercrafts, and tread-based vehicles, each with their own upgradable engines, armor, tires, and suspension. It's pretty expensive to keep trading up your cars, but once you get the right combination you're unstoppable.

Rock 'n Roll Racing has as much rock and roll as any 16-bit game should have. It features synthesized tracks of "Born to be Wild," "Bad to the Bone," "Highway Star," and other classic songs, which add to the game's copious amounts of attitude. MIDI tracks don't exactly have the kind of gravitas as hearing Steppenwolf and Deep Purple perform, but it was pretty awesome back in the days of the SNES and the Genesis.

Unfortunately, Rock n' Roll Racing has yet to be released on the Virtual Console, so if you want to play the game yourself have two legal choices. One, you can track down the game for one of the 16-bit systems, dust off your old SNES or Genesis, and get playing. Two, you can pick up the Game Boy Advance remake of the game that Blizzard released in 2003 and play it on your old-school GBA, DS, or DS Lite. Either way, get ready for a bit of eBay hunting.