Review

Redline Racer is an old-school arcade racer. There is a physics model involved, it just has little basis in reality. Perhaps the justification for the game's name comes from the fact that you don't ever have to use the brakes, rather you can 'engine brake' by just down-shifting as much as needed into the curves. You can't blow the engine (this is arcade racing, remember) so by down-shifting instead of braking, you keep the RPMs maxed, or redlined, all the time. And keeping the engine revved at max is essential, because the power curve isn't a curve so much as it is a step function, with a precipitous drop in power immediately below the red zone. As for the handling physics, there's a few idiosyncrasies to it. A brush with another rider, or a slight wobble after hitting a bump in the road is sometimes all that's needed to throw the bike and send you flying. This by itself isn't the problem. Road bikes are squirrelly by nature. They're essentially big heavy gyros, and if the axis of rotation gets too askew from the preferred orthogonal to the velocity, well, expect bad things to happen. No, the problem is that the destabilization seems entirely random. You'll innocently contact another rider and get thrown, only seconds after having pin-balled through a whole pack of riders with no consequences. Or something almost unseen in the road geometry will put a hitch in the rear of the bike and send you tumbling, where at other times you can go tearing over the shoulder of the road, jump curves, etc. and not be affected in the least. This inconsistency in behavior breeds frustration.

But the racing is fast and furious, and the tracks feature distinct settings, with a fair amount of vertical variation. If you've got 15 minutes to kill, this kind of racing is a decent way to kill it. Given that these kind of quick-fix games are best enjoyed in small casual doses, it's unfortunate that so many of them subscribe to the typical unlocking design, forcing you to commit time to them even if you just want the 15 minute pick-up sessions. Redline Racer is guilty of this in the 1st degree. You must win a race on each of the first set of available tracks at the hardest difficulty level (there are three) before being given access to a few additional tracks and bikes. Then, you have to do it again, only racing each track in reverse, before you get access to a few more tracks and bikes. This kind of thing just pisses me off. Both PC and console racing games do this religiously. Personally, I think it's just because the designers are lazy and can't bother themselves to think up a reason for you to get otherwise involved in their game. If they've truly made a fun racing game, I'll want to play it, and keep playing it. I'm not going to feel cheated if I'm just 'given' all the tracks. To provide the sense of achievement, they should design a decent career mode, keep track of my accomplishments, implement some persistence and continuity into the racing context, and maybe even (hold onto your hats) add a little characterization into the game. Characterization in a racing game? [gasp!] Who can imagine such a thing?

Anyway, given that Redline Racer fails at all of that, you can just use the cheat code below. I won't tell.

Ultimately, I can't shake the feeling that consoles serve up this kind of racing so much better than the PC. The biggest flaw in consoles is typically their controllers, specifically their lack of smooth analog sensitivity, which is a requisite for simulation racing. Arcade racing, by design, is more forgiving of a sloppy, more digital-esque, controller. I use my gamepad for most arcade racers that I play on my PC, so it's like I'm playing on a console anyway, just with crisper graphics. Of course, back in 1998, you couldn't get a console game to look as nice as Redline Racer. Incidentally, 1998 was a really weird year for PC games, graphics-wise. The range of graphics quality for PC games was disturbingly wide. We're talking Grand Canyon wide. On the one end, you've got Die By The Sword. That would be the "ass" end of the spectrum. And on the other end, you've got Unreal! If we want to put Redline Racer into the mix, we can do it within the niche of arcade motorcycle racers. As nice as Redline Racer looks, it actually winds up at the bottom of the list. It has a low, fixed, resolution, very low polygon budget, and sports muddy textures. Within months of its release, we get the likes of Motoracer 2 and Motocross Madness, both of which look fabulous, make excellent use of D3D and allow high resolutions. 1998 was a real transition year for graphics in PC games. Glide's supernova flash of fame was already fading, but D3D was still wearing diapers as an API, and OpenGL wasn't getting properly implemented on the cards.

Anyway, I'm not surprised today to see this kind of racer fade from the PC shelves. The gameplay is well-suited to couch gaming, and there's nothing wrong with that. The unfortunate thing is that there aren't more hard-core simulation racers stepping in to take their place. EA continues to crank out their F1 series, and Papyrus has sold their soul to Nascar, but motorcycle racing doesn't have any real flagship games, now that EA seems to have abandoned the Superbike series. And I'm disappointed that nobody seems interested in developing a simulation racer that isn't patterned after some form of contemporary racing. Math is math, and a hard-core sim doesn't have to be hatched from the nest of a real-world 21st century sanctioned racing body. This is gaming, people, let's see a little creativity.

But I'm supposed to be talking about Redline Racer. So, yeah, it's marginally fun. The locked tracks and bikes are a pet peeve of mine. The biggest problem I had with it was that the physics straddled the fence between allowing racing with reckless abandon and punishing it.