Race Drivin' on Genesis

Most of what Genesis was doing at launch was triumphantly successful. Even though Altered Beast can be looked at now in horror at how terrible that game actually was, it was still pretty great for the time period.

Race Drivin' on the other hand has almost no redeeming qualities and was one of the first massive letdowns of my life

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It was based on the wildly popular and immersive driving experience (for the time) game by the same name. It had the promise to deliver what was a coin guzzling 3-d (ish) experience with unlimited continues that would have normally cost you 50 cents per go.

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Basically, both games were mean to be a more realistic adaptation of what driving a car in crazy situations would actually be like and as you might expect, it was extremely easy to trash the car unlike other racing games where physics didn't really play much of a part.

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The Genesis version though, perhaps due to the fact that you could continue endlessly, was insanely difficult. One would presume that since they were porting it down to a handheld controller instead of gas pedals, gear shifters, and a steering wheel that the arcade provided, that the controls would be dumbed down a bit.. Not this game..

The controls were extremely difficult and this created what can only be described and a frustratingly bad gaming experience. I, thankfully, only rented this game and after 3 or 4 tries at it, gave up in horror as all of my pleasant arcade experiences involving the same title were completely smashed.

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Even for the early 90's these were extremely sub-par graphics.

It should come as no surprise that this dud was just one in a long line of crap that we would come to expect from Atari until their eventual demise just a few years later.

The reception to this game was so god-awful that the 32x version of the game was abandoned out of fear that no one would buy it - which they would have deserved.

I highly suggest you check out this ROM (for free) just so you can see how awful a gaming experience this truly was. It was almost like Atari didn't even care anymore.