Death Rally for Windows

[Karza]

Back in 1996 Remedy (better known for the Max Payne games) published a nice little racing game called Death Rally. Not exactly a huge success, but a fun little game nonetheless. And now they updated it to run on modern systems and are offering it for free here. Give it a go.

Basically, you start with a crappy car and a few hundred bucks, and work your way up until you're driving something that looks like a cross between a car and a fighter jet. And then find out the final boss (yeah, this particular racing game has an end boss ) drives something even meaner. Oh, and the cars are armed, though that particular feature can be turned off if you're into more traditional racing.

The game could certainly use more tracks and a better impact modeling. Also, the actual racing part is in a resolution best described as "fuck there are lego blocks on my screen!". But hey, it's from 1996 and completely free, can't complain too much .

[TheMuffinKing]

Didn't they have a Duke Nukem car?

[Karza]

Not as such, but Duke Nukem is one of the rival drivers, yes.

[Starglider]

I can't honestly say that this is a good game, but it was bizarrely addictive. I spent a lot of time playing it in my first year of university. More variety in the weapons and the track design, e.g. like Supercars II on the Amiga, really would've helped. I seem to recall the multiplayer being really buggy though - I don't know if they ever patched that.

[Sarevok]

There used to be a whole sub genre of games about street cars armed with guns, cannons and missiles.What happened to games like Interstate 76 and Streets of Sim city ?

[Jade Falcon]

The last examples I remember of that type of game were on the consoles, Full Auto, Vigilante 8 and Twisted Metal.

[Stark]

It was fun just to watch the little map marker for your terminator race around to kill someone. I loved this game, back in the day. It was a great use of the sports-game style 'season' framework in a combat game.

[Deniz]

For the big fans of DR: I found the demo version to be superior in a few ways, namely it had a few different tracks that I found more fun and also had much better music, in my opinion. The downside is the demo version won't let you upgrade to the fastest 3 cars. Still fun to try to win, though.

I found this game to be most excellent and addictive. Starting with a crappy car and having to just survive, while settling for a measley sum of money for coming in 2nd or 3rd by killing Farmer Ted in his VW, which was barely enough to repair your car, and then eventually getting enough for a sweet car which could toast all your enemies. It was classic "struggle at the bottom, thrive on top" RPG style development.