| Posted By
Gaia
on 2023-04-05
07:06:56
|  Radar Rat Race!
 In our "games that could have been but weren't" pseudo-series (yes, think about Squirm 16 and Galaxian Plus4...) we continue to present you classic, old-school games that could have been released on our system, but for some reason they weren't.
Today's release, Radar Rat Race, is - again - a modified clone of an arcade classic released in 1980 by Namco, called Rally-X. It was first developed for the VIC-20 by HAL Laboratories in Japan, but soon enough, Namco's corporate lawyers convinced Commodore that it would not be such a good idea to release any unlicensed arcade games. So Commodore's software engineers went on and transformed the cars into rats, the streets into a maze filled with stationary cats, and renamed the game 'Radar Rat Race'. The game was a launch title for the VIC-20 released as a cartridge and was later also ported to the Commodore 64 in 1982, and now this version has finally been ported to the Commodore 16, too! Game journalists at the time criticized the game's controls and repetitive sound, but called it "quite exciting and amusing to play."
You have to guide your mouse through a giant maze. The "camera" only shows a small part of the maze at any given time. At least three rats pursue the player. The goal is to eat all of the pieces of cheese, shown for the entire maze on a radar screen, without getting caught by a rat or bumping into a stationary cat. By pressing the joystick button, the mouse can disperse a limited amount of magical dust (called "star screen"), which confuses the rats for about five seconds. Once the round is complete, the game starts again, with more rats and faster play. Certain levels are special in that they are faster and have more stationary cats than normal levels ("speed run"). The gameplay is originally accompanied by a rhythmically altered version of a phrase from Three Blind Mice looping in a mere three seconds that gets on the nerves very quickly and was replaced by a complete composition by Maestro Csabo meddling other lesser known titles, but you can always get back to the original tune by pressing 'F3' on the title screen or 'E' during gameplay.
If you're a C16-only freak and the game still seems strikingly familiar to you, that is not a coincidence. We already have Menekülés, a "clone of the clone" with cats chasing your mouse and collecting cheese in a... guess what?... maze!
The game is relatively compact, so we could squeeze in a nice title screen for you, but we leave the details up to your Google skills.
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Posted By
orion70
on 2023-04-07
07:06:56
| Re: Radar Rat Race!
Very well done! 
RRR has always been a top fav in my VIC, ever since my parents bought me one in 1982. I must admit, the VIC version IMHO is better than the 64's (and consequently also better than this version), due to the bigger characters, which make the whole screen and the sprites more "cartoonesque". But I tried this port in the online emulator, and it's fast, funny, and colored enough. Also, the music is slightly different from the VIC tune, maybe a bit slower, and holds a strange "echo" effect. Overall, very nice music & SFX.
Oh, and the Banksy title graphics are sooo good! See also https://www.myartbroker.com/artist-banksy/series-radar-rat
Thanks Gaia and Csabo for this conversion!
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Posted By
Gaia
on 2023-04-16
12:41:29
| Re: Radar Rat Race!
Thank you for the kind words! Actually, I have been aware of the VIC20 version but only checked it out properly once the conversion was well underway. It also has a nice demo mode, which the C64 version doesn't and the HUD is really well done there. I was playing with the idea of "stealing" it for the +4 as the C64 one used sprites but then I realized it would not have been that straightforward.
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