For the past few days I have been fooling around NES and SNES emulators in my spare time, reliving childhood memories seeing if my old favorites have stood the test of time. I vaguely remembered playing some sort of strange SNES/Super Famicom Japanese drag racing game at my friend's house a long time ago, so I hunted around and found the ROM version of the game.
The game was originally made in 1995 and is called "Zero 4 Champ". Unlike traditional racing games with things called "corners" and "braking", this game is all about acceleration and top speed. In fact, the game lacks any controls for steering your car, as it as always pointed straight ahead. While this may seem like a snooze, the game makes up for it by having an innovative (challenging?) control system.
As you can see in the screen capture, the game uses an H-pattern shifter. One button operates the accelerator, another operates the clutch, and the d-pad/arrow keys operate the gearshift. You put the car in first, dump the clutch when the light turns green and engage the clutch each time you up shift, manually moving the gear lever with the d-pad. It's pretty tough to get the hang of, but once you do, it's actually pretty fun.
The game has a decent selection of mid 90's licensed cars, including the R32 & R33 GT-R, RX-7, Impreza, Evo, MR2, GTO etc. You can also tune the cars, switch tires, transmission and other parts.
I take winning VERY seriously, which is why I am using a 1200hp "fanny" car to race a stock Subaru Legacy.
Impreza vs. Evo battle in all of its 16-bit glory.
The game has also has an RPG-like story mode but it won't be very fun if you can't read Japanese.
I actually just found out that there has been a new zeroyon game released for the Nintendo DS. I wonder if it is worth 2800yen or if I'd be happier playing the classic version?
Anyone else play this before?
I picked up the sega saturn sequel to this a couple of years ago for super cheap on ebay, mainly because it has one of the best names ever, Zero 4 Champ: DooZy-J Type R!!
It plays pretty much the same as the SNES one though.
Posted by: kurisu | April 21, 2008 at 01:36 AM
I've played this before on a zSNES emulator years ago too! i remember losing it and i have never found it until now! holy crap man, the one thing i remember the most about this game was trying to figure out the controls. It was just simple as moving a manual transmission. its funny because the game was in japanese too, and very unique. i spent hours on this game building up as i go. nice find! looks like im gonna have to start whipping out the emulator somehow :D
Posted by: Francisco | October 08, 2008 at 01:41 PM