DEATH RACE (1987) [Atlantis] Cassette Programming: Siz (Text from Rear of Cassette label): Drive at speeds of up to 300 mph, through town and country, day and night, to overtake the 70 cars that left you stalled on the starting grid. Your reactions will need to be like lightning as the slightest mistake will mean instant death.

REVIEW by Phoenix Otaku

I'm not usually a fan of racing games, as I've never been into cars and usually find car related games boring. Because of this, I expected to immediately dislike Death Race, but that wasn't the case. In fact I found Death Race to be a nicely paced, fun action game.

The premise of the game is simple - you must race at high speed and overtake as many cars as possible in 80 seconds. If you overtake 70 cars, without losing your 5 lives then you advance to the next level and gain an extra life. The controls are simple, and easy to get to grips with - left and right steer the car and you can accelerate and decelerate with up and down joystick motions. Usually you only need to reach a certain speed and leave it at that for the rest of the level.

The sound and graphics are quite comfortable for this game, with the changing scenes, passing trees and the buildings all giving a feeling of actual racing speed. There is no music, just a simple hum of the car engine, and a noise to indicate you've passed a car.

The game isn't too difficult, as all it requires is to occasionally change speed, while continually overtaking the other cars. You can't collide with cars as this causes you to lose a life and then you find yourself a sitting duck as cars crash into you from behind before you've even had time to accelerate away. On the first level, cars only appear one at a time on the screen, but when you advance a level the cars are a lot closer together, making it more of a challenge to avoid collisions! On the upside you'll find the 70 car target a lot easier to reach despite having only 60 seconds to achieve it.

Overall, Death Race is a fairly easy game, which does get a little boring after awhile.

"Chrysler!" (6/10)

GAME TIPS

Keep your speed at around 240-260MPH. This will make sure you're going fast enough to pass 70 cars in the time limit, but still slow enough to be able to keep control of the car. As the levels go on, it's best to slow down a little to be able to manoeuvre between the cars in time.

At first, stay in the middle, that way when you see a car coming, you have plenty of time to react and move either left or right. If you're stuck to one side when a car comes, there's only one direction you can go - away from the side, and that could mean into the path of another oncoming car!

CLICK HERE to Download an Unlimited Lives file for use in the Atari 800Win Emulator.

CLICK HERE to Download an Infinite Time file for use in the Atari 800Win Emulator.

Further Information:

In the year 2000 hit and run driving is no longer a felony.
It's the National Sport!

Atlantis' Death Race game takes its name and logo font from the 1975 Roger Corman film Death Race 2000, which starred David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone (pre Rocky/Rambo fame). The film features a futuristic race where points are scored for killing pedestrians, with the most points gained from the very young or very old. Although quite a low budget production, Death Race 2000 has a cult following and would later influence the Mad Max movies, an 8 issue comic book series in 1995 and many games including Carmageddon on the PC in the late 90s.

Issues 1 & 5 of Roger Corman's 'Death Race 2020'
An 8 issue comic book series (1995)

Killer List of Video Games
(Information and pictures of the Rare 1976 arcade game Death Race)
www.klov.com/game_detail.php?letter=&game_id=7541

Bad Movies.org
(Information, review, pictures, sound files and a video clip for Death Race 2000)
www.badmovies.org/movies/deathrace