Road Fighter



Road Fighter is a simple overhead perspective race game. The race course is presented continuously in the upward direction. The player begins in 40th place and must make his or her way to 1st across 6 different sections of the race course. The player must maneuver his car between innocent bystanding cars as well as opponent racers.

One special feature that makes Road Fighter stand out is the fact that when you crash, you don't necessarily explode on the spot as in many other racers. Rather, you begin to slide in the direction you were bumped. At the point, the player has the opportunity to correct the slide by pushing the joystick into the direction of the slide, righting the orientation of the car. If the players fails to do this in time, the car spins out of control and crashes on the side of the road.

For a Konami game, Road Fighter wasn't outstandingly popular, and made very few appearances outside of Japan. It was ported to the MSX computer and the Famicom, two systems that Konami greatly supported. It did arrive for the NES after a time, but only in Europe, never in the states. The home versions appear to have removed the competition aspect from the game and made it strictly a survival race game. There is no lap ranking on the home versions and the NES versions only contain 5 stages.

Controls
Note: The MSX version uses only one button for the gas.
 * Joystick: Press left or right to navigate laterally across the road.
 * Low Gear: Press the low gear gas button to get the car started. The top speed of the car in low gear is 192 km/sec. (224 km/sec on the NES)
 * High Gear: You can not use High Gear from a stand still. In order to drive the car with the high gear button pressed, you must be moving at least 100 km/sec, but it is recommended that you wait until you're closer to 170 km/sec before you switch.  Maximum speed in High Gear is 400 km/sec. (On the NES version, you can use high gear from a stand still, but it is also not recommended since you will accelerate very slowly.)