#122: Road Runner's Death Valley Rally

BEEP BEEP! ZIP! BANG!

I grew up watching Looney Tunes cartoons, and this game really captures the feel of those cartoons. It has the right sounds. It has the right music. The intro video did the whole 'pause the screen and use fake latin to describe the characters' thing.

Coyote so hungry!

You play the role of the Road Runner in this game and you play a Sonic style platformer with the twist that you need to avoid the Coyote and whatever crazy contraption he's put together to try to catch you. I never really played Sonic games so I don't know if it had the same problem this game had, but I found I was moving way too fast to possibly react to incoming obstacles. I'm sure if you played the game a lot you could memorize the locations of all the spikey plants and scorpions and the like but I kept running into them, losing my speed burst, and getting annoyed.

UH-OH!

They managed to make use of lots of buttons on the SNES controller, in particular by making R be a taunt button where the Road Runner stuck out his tongue and L be a taunt button where the Road Runner pulls off a BEEP BEEP sound effect. It made the game feel a lot like the cartoon, where Road Runner would often stick out his tongue or BEEP BEEP at Wile E Coyote after some plan backfired on him. In this case the wheel of his steamroller detached and is about to loop around and crush the poor dejected Coyote.

Now, I need to be honest here... I always hated the Road Runner. I identified with the Coyote. He's a smart guy with lots of cool outside the box ideas who keeps getting taunted by others for his failures. The Road Runner is a bully! I wanted the Coyote to catch him and eat all his delicious bits. The feather that tastes like banana... YUM! Anyway, that makes a game where I have to take the role of the bully not one I really want to play. You wouldn't want to play a Back to the Future game where you're Biff Tannen, would you?

The game has good music and sound and controls and feel. But I didn't like the protagonist and I didn't like the game/level design with being forced to run into obstacles the first time you meet them. But I could see this being a game people could like, so I can't dock it too much.

Rating: C+