A Massive Upgrade, Despite the Smaller Size

Rareware put out R.C. Pro-Am in 1988 and it proved to be a massive success. Nintendo loved it, publishing it as a first party title in the U.S., and it generated solid sales, cementing Rare as one of Nintendo’s brightest third party developers. It was a feather in the cap for the company, who were making big waves with a number of their games including Wizards and Warriors, Solar Jetman, and Battletoads. One would think a success like that would instantly inspire the company to make a sequel, but no. It would be three years, and a different console, before Rare revisited the genre they helped to redefine.

Super R.C. Pro-Am came out in 1991 but, despite its name, and the console being out at the time, the game wasn’t designed for the Super Nintendo. Instead it was put on the Game Boy, the tiny little handheld that could that had quickly become Nintendo’s own means of printing money. Rare saw the potential for a sequel, especially on a console that was in every child’s hands, and they wanted a part of it. So they resurrected the R.C. Pro-Am name and created a title that felt like a more complete vision of the formula.

At its core, Super R.C. Pro-Am is an upgrade to all aspects of R.C. Pro-Am (except the most obvious). You take on the role of one of four R.C. car drivers, taking your little plastic vehicle around the tracks. Your goal is to get in the top three of four in every race. Do that and you can move on. Fail and get fourth place and it’s game over. You want the wins, you want the fame, and you want the upgrades so you can continue racing to be the best on the tony tracks of plastic glory.

Like with the previous game, there are basic upgrades scattered around the track. Tires, engines, and handling can be upgraded, giving your car the speed, power, and maneuverability it needs to stay ahead. And you’ll need to collect them as the computer characters will be collecting upgrades as well, and if you don’t grab them you’ll fall behind, quickly left in the dust by all the competitors. And if that happens, well, you can bet fourth place is just around the corner.

Naturally there’s also weapons to collect along the path. Missiles and mines are now in your repertoire, and you can switch between them to attack foes behind and in front of you. This is a solid upgrade as it gives you more ways to handle situations, instead of being forced to let your foes in front of you to kill them, risking them snagging first place before you can get it. Mines are very handy, and they’re one of the best weapons you can use so long as you’re regularly in front of all your foes.

The game has 24 tracks that it loops through, and as you go along you’ll get not only the car parts but also the letters to spell “Nintendo”. That’s eight tracker per “Nintendo”, and each time you collect all the letters your. Car upgrades. You go from the Racer to the Speed Demon, and then the Spiker, each of which controls better than the previous one. You get a solid speed boost with each new car, but the handling also improves, making the cars more capable and more interesting to drive.

Like the previous game, the controls start out pretty loose. The racer feels like a drift vehicle, and you’ll have to come into turns early to get the right line and no go careening off the track. The Speed Demon is still pretty slippy, but it moves faster and does feel a little better. The Spiker, though, really pulls it together, with much tighter controls in the corners, requiring almost no drift to maintain your line. Weirdly in a way, then, it does feel like the game gets easier as it goes along, at least when it comes to car control.

Bear in mind, though, that the while the cars get easier to control, the tracks themselves become far more diabolical. You still have the map of the track in the bottom corner, but the map only shows the general shape. As the tracks increase in difficulty, you’ll get more hazards, not just water and oil but also sand traps, and you’ll come upon sections that have smaller lanes, or split lanes as well. None of this is shown on the map so you have to learn the tracks, and not just react, to keep up in this fast paced game.

The other big change is that the game features an actual end. As you might have noticed, I said you collect the letters for “Nintendo” on each track, one per track. That’s eight letters per track, and thus three loops of “Nintendo” across 24 tracks. However, there are only two car upgrades. That’s because once you collect the final set of “Nintendo” you win the game. Your racer is a champion, celebrated by all, and the game ends (instead of looping over and over until you die like in the NES edition). It’s a small thing, but it actually makes this a game you can legitimately conquer, and I appreciate that.

With all that said, the move to the Game Boy does introduce a couple of flaws. First, due to the limited screen size, this game feels smaller and tighter than the NES version. You get less draw space, less to see, and less time to react, which is only compounded by the fact that the Game Boy graphics can feel pretty sludgy at times, especially when characters (like the vehicles here) are moving fast. It can make it hard to play the game at times and you’ll have to learn to react on instinct and not just based on what you see to get through.

And, of course, the game is also four-color black-and-white, which loses some of the colorful pop of the original. It’s not a bad looking game for a Game Boy title, and Rare did about the best they could to translate the title over while keeping everything as clear and legible as they could. They were limited by the hardware and with both versions in existence, it’s hard to not feel like a little something was lost in the process.

Although, that is all moot if you play the game on the Game Boy Color, where the system assigned colors for the cars and gives everything a much easier to watch feel. But you do lose the ability to play the game on the go that way, so you have to pick which way you want to play it, really.

In general, Super R.C. Pro-Am is a solid racer and a great upgrade over the NES version. Rare tried to do all they could to make this game work on the Game Boy and, by and large, they really succeeded. Anyone that liked the original title would absolutely enjoy this pint-sized version. And those of us tracking back through the history of racers will note all the little improvements that came along with the game, improvements that would influence not only the next game in this series, but also all the copycat games that would come after Rare was done with this racing trilogy…