Racing rapidly down river

Review

Played on: PlayStation & DuckStation
Released: 1997

Much like Team Soho's Porsche Challenge from 1997, review here, Rapid Racer is a forgotten racer. The development team were indeed a busy company leading to these two, solid racing releases in the same year! While they both are in the arcade category, most racers were back then, they're vastly different from each other.

I remember the hype around Rapid Racer's number of racetracks; 256.000! Although the main count is actually six unique racetracks, when completing the singleplayer mode you can access a fractal generator which can randomly generate 256.000 layouts with segments of the six main ones. It's a crazy but cool feature, kind of ahead of its time!

I read about Rapid Racer in a "preplay" article in the first copy of the Official UK PlayStation Magazine I ever bought! I still own that copy and recall being quite excited reading about how the developers made water currents and realistic water behaviour. However, tons of other car-centric racers came as priorities before getting my hands on it and like many other titles; time made me forget it. Last year, I decided to pick up a copy and finally play it properly.

Let's put on our life vests for a closer look!

After an obligatory, 90s style, CGI intro you're greeted to a simple main menu where you can choose between one, two and 3-5 player. Before I delve into the singleplayer, a quick note about the other two multiplayer modes; 2 player is splitscreen, while 3-5 player is a pass-the-controller affair.

Singleplayer allows you to choose difficulty; it's tricky to master how the boat handles, so I'd recommend beginning on easy. From here you can choose a speedboat with the stats you prefer and you're ready to take on the six racetracks. These are followed by six races at night on the same racetracks, then the third set are the same racetracks mirrored. I'm not a fan of mirrored stuff in racers, but it was a common quirk of the time it was released.

First impression of controlling the speedboats is tricky. Most likely you'll be all over the place, oversteering from side to side, smashing into the shore and obstacles. Collisions not only cost you valuable speed and time, but they also feel rather ludicrous in their physics. Your first impression will feel as if speeding in a straight line is impossible and partly, you'd be right, but it's where the gameplay shows its strength. You're speeding in a boat in water with waves and strong currents that pushes you around, going in a straight line is not really a thing in water!

It's meant to be challenging keeping the boat steady, forcing you to constantly correct your course ahead. The turns must be taken earlier than in cars, as the boat needs time to alter course through the water and begin turning. Being impatient and oversteering puts your boat in a too sharp of an angle. For the most challenging turns the shoulder buttons allow you to turn even sharper, but these only need careful, nuanced inputs to avoid oversteering!

I played it first with an analogue stick and constantly gave it small nudges to keep my boat going straight, correcting its course ahead through waves and currents. Although many racers are preferable with the d-pad on PS1, I liked playing with the analogue stick on this one. It feels easier to input more gradual and careful turns with a stick.

Later, I tried the NegCon controller, pictured on the top of this post, and found out it's brilliant for this! Probably the perfect match for beginners, allowing for a far more gradual turning angle and control when going for the sharper turns. It helps you from oversteering and taking too harsh turns too.

Although you get used to it, there's no denying that the crash physics are crude and the way boats are thrown about in weird directions when knocking into the edge or obstacles is frustrating. There's a distinct need for some way of easier straightening out your boat, should you end up losing control and going the wrong way. I fear the unusual control sensation can be a big hurdle for many players.

An added element to the racing are bonus items scattered across the racetracks. Green ones are turbos, which can be stocked up to three. Red markers take away a turbo slot, requiring a turbo to remove it. They're strategically placed in front of shortcuts. Three red markers and you're punished with a speed loss. The blue clocks freeze the timer for a while.

These bonus items add an element of strategy to races, especially keeping the turbos for getting ahead of competitors or accelerating quickly out of a crash. In addition, there are yellow markers, which you need to collect five of in each race, which in turn gives access to a bonus level. Here you can complete an easy time challenge to upgrade either speed, acceleration, ship hull or handling.

Visually, Rapid Racer is a solid racer for the system, it enjoys the advancements in visuals from a typical 1997 release where the PS1 hardware was more cleverly utilised. There's a fair bit of variety in environments and colourful palette to give make each racetrack fairly unique. Still, I could've used some more landmarks along the shore to distinctly remember each one.

Water is well presented with clear sign as to where waves and currents are situated. While it's not up to Wave Racer 64 standards when it comes to convincing water, it does a decent job at least feeling challenging to push a boat through. What it lacks is proper shiny surface, more movement and softness. 

Impressively, the game runs 60fps, that's 50fps for PAL, which brings and extra fluidity to the movement of the boats and responsive controls. Although it probably restrains the game from having the most visual detail alongside the racetrack. A lot of the environments just feel like mountainsides.

Audio has the right number of splashes and noisy boat engines needed. Music, which was sadly altered for the US version called Turboprop Racing, is luckily the same in both the PAL and Japanese releases. It's a full soundtrack made by Apollo 440, a popular techno band at the time. It's a great and suiting soundtrack!

Had the crash physics and overall ease of controls been polished better, with perhaps a couple of easier racetracks, I think Rapid Racer would've been easy to recommend everyone. It's the actual manoeuvring that's the difficult part, as you can quite easily take on the opponents at least on easy, on normal you'll need to be fast and precise.

In the same manner as Porsche Challenge, Rapid Racer is a forgotten, yet solid racer for the system. It's perhaps overshadowed in the middle ground of less famous racers on the system. I'd say Porsche Challenge, outside of the difficulty is an easier accessible racer from the same developer, but less unique. Rapid Racer stands out by being about boat racing and leaning more towards a wipEout control style.

If you're on the lookout for a cool racer from this era and want to extend your library of racers on the system, check out Rapid Racer on the PS1. Give those controls some time to get used to and enjoy a solid speedboat racer!