Horse Racing (Arcadia 2001)

(Review archived from September 30, 2014)

Remember a few months ago when I said, “the blog has grown … and nowadays the articles appearing here are exclusive to the blog itself“?  Well as of this post, that statement will have been a lie.  I’ll be on vacation over the next couple of weekends, and rather than let the blog languish during that time, I found myself digging deep into the archives.  In order to keep the blog beast satiated, I must pour a never-ending stream of content into its gaping maw!  So it was actually rather serendipitous that I remembered these reviews existed at all.  Earlier this week I found myself waxing nostalgic about online friends who have come and gone over the years, and I had a spark of recollection about the “Random Gaming Review Project” I took part in a number of years back.  This project was the brainchild of a supercool dude who went by the name of Spruitje on the forum which hosted the event.  Unfortunately, the project was rather short lived, due to the fact that Spruitje simply up and disappeared one day, never to be seen again on those forums.  I sometimes wonder whatever happened to him, and I certainly hope it was nothing terribly serious.  Such is the ephemeral nature of online friendships.  As of this writing, he still shows as having been offline for ten years.  Spruitje, if you’re out there somewhere, I hope you’re doing well, buddy.  At any rate, here’s an abridged version of Spruitje’s goals for the project:

Goals of this project:

The goals of The Random Review Gaming Project (in short: RGRP) can be easily broken down in two parts:

• [Forum] members volunteer to make reviews of randomly selected games, to create an extensive and ever expanding database of game reviews, showcasing today’s retro-fan opinions on games from the distant and not so distant past
  
• The underlying goal of course is to have fun and share that fun with fellow members.

Revisit the past and (re-)discover what you’ve been missing

This project stimulates playing a random game and asking for an objective/personal view about it from the player. It does this by selecting games from numbered lists using randomly generated numbers. This way we hope to showcase every and any game to see how well it stands the sands of time and if they are worth playing at this current date. When applying to volunteer for making a review it is totally unknown what game is going to be offered. This way we hope to get the most personal, objective and unbiased reviews possible.

Spruitje

Basically, a small pool of volunteers would all play and review the same randomly selected game.  Then at the end of the review period for that game, the “best review” would be selected by other forum members.  So over the next few posts, I’ll be re-blogging the contributions I made to this project.  In addition to marking the (temporary) return of “archived content” style posts, these posts will also break with the tradition of only reviewing games I’ve beaten.  This is partly due to the fact that some of these games were not ‘beatable’ in the conventional sense. The random selection process of the games themselves was also a factor of course, because well … the number of bad and/or mediocre games out there far outweigh the number of good ones.  In short, I had no burning desire to play most of the games selected for the project for any longer than necessary.  And with Horse Racing, both these factors held true; it was neither beatable nor good.

So with that being said … let’s mount up for this review of Horse Racing.  GIDDY UP!

If this is the Sport of Kings, then consider me a pauper …

So today we’re taking a look at Horse Racing released on the Emerson Arcadia 2001 back in 1982.  We’re diving deep into the esoteric and obscure with this title.  This game is not listed on Wikipedia among the official releases for the system, and the system itself is not officially listed on MobyGames (ed. note: It is now).  Does this bode well for our title?  Have we discovered an amazing undiscovered relic within the library of the Arcadia?   … Well probably not to be honest, but I’m more than willing to give this game a fair shake.

In the interest of full disclosure I have to admit that it’s tough for me to approach this game completely free of preconceptions.  First and foremost, I’m not particularly a fan of the Horse Racing genre of games under any guise.  It’s not that I hate horse racing games, it’s just that my levels of apathy for this particular genre are practically off the charts.  I suppose if I stumbled upon a Final Furlong cabinet in an arcade I might play it with my kids, but that’s about the extent of it.  And I have to tell you, this game is most certainly not Final Furlong.

Secondly, I am not at all a fan of “number pad” games.  What I mean is that during the early 80’s video game consoles went through an awkward transitory phase in which designers thought it was a great idea to pattern their controllers after touch tone telephones.  Kids … this is never a good idea.

It’s as if the designers of the console blew all their R&D money on hookers and coke (hey it was the early 80’s), then on the final day pending deadline, just as the design lead picked up the telephone to report his complete and utter failure, he looked at the handset he was holding and said, “Hey, Wait a sec … this might just work”. These control schemes almost never translate well into an emulated environment.  The whole mess is further complicated due to the fact that games utilizing these control schemes often necessitated the use of controller overlays, just to figure out which buttons to push to actually play your game.  Horse Racing is no exception in this regard:

(Here’s a bit better translation of this picture for those playing along at home).

Ugh.  It’s just a horrid mess, and it was (in part) bone headed design decisions like this that led to the Video Game Crash of 1983.  Thanks coked up 80’s video game design engineers.

So … can I overcome my preconceptions and eke some enjoyment out of this game?  Well after literally spending 20 minutes on the screen in which bets are placed, my confidence in the quality of this game was severely rattled.  I mean, one could chalk this up to the poor translation of controls between the original hardware and an emulated environment.  That would certainly be the charitable assessment, but really it’s just an example of extremely poor intuitive design, especially in a game like this where the excitement shouldn’t come from puzzling over poorly implemented controls, but rather from winning imaginary money by betting on imaginary horses.  Admittedly, once I finally did figure out how to place bets, and how to translate the onscreen notations I could reliably buzz through the screen.  Unfortunately I think any lasting memories I have of this game will be purely related to staring at the garish yellow Place Bets screen wondering just what in the hell I was supposed to do.

So the bets are (finally) in!  I mean this game is Horse Racing right?  This is where the rubber hits the road (or where the hooves hit the track as it were)!  Right?  RIGHT?! And they’re off!  OK, I’m going to put this question out there, and it’s an honest question for those who have actually played the game.  I also feel like this question is extremely indicative of the quality of the game.  Do players actions actually exhibit any control whatsoever over the speed and handling of your chosen horse?.  I could be forgiving here if this was purely a betting and gambling type game (although I would hope that if that were the case the races would be mercifully shorter), but the control scheme I linked above seems to indicate that you can whip your horse (poor horses).  At no time did I see that whipping the horse had any effect on the horse nor on the outcome of the race itself (stubborn horses).  Even if I sat back and did nothing, sometimes my horse would win, sometimes it would lose; sometimes it would get a burst of speed, sometimes it would slow down.  And there was nothing onscreen to indicate whether your supposed actions on the animal had any effect either.  Outside of the betting elements the entire thing just feels on rails.

They might as well have called this game, “Bet Imaginary Money on a Random Number Generator,” because that’s pretty much the experience you’re getting here.  I think the games AI might actually realize this, because I did quite well in terms of my in-game winnings … but at what cost?  It was as if the game looked out at me through the emulator and across the span of years to say, “I’m sorry I suck … here, please accept my imaginary money as consolation”.  No … just no.

Final Verdict (adjusted for blog scale): 2 coked up 80’s video game designers out of 10