Reader Reviews

Racing Destruction Set (C64)

by Peej

The Commodore 64 (lovingly known by its fans as "The Commode", probably because of the amount of shit movie licences that found their way onto it). This was the de-rigueur gaming machine way back when gaming machines had whacking great big keyboards stuck to the front and loaded their games predominantly from tape. Anyway, I digress. Racing Destruction Set for the C64 was pretty much "Scalextric" by any other name and the basic premise of the game was the creation of wild and whacky track layouts from a collection of parts, on which dinky little racing cars and bikes were pitted against each other. Sly tactics came in the form of mines and missiles that could be deployed to hamper the opposition (this as a two-player head to head game resulted in several sibling disputes in our house usually ending up in physical violence of some form or another).

Once you'd built your track and watched as the computer painstakingly checked the thing to make sure that it was complete, you could start a race. Now the C64 wasn't renowned for its processing speed or huge amounts of RAM, but it managed to give the impression of a slightly jerky and blocky fight to the death in speed machines (head to head the ubiquitous split-screen display often resulted in some confusion as to who was who). Controls were as simple as pie. A throttle (on the joystick button) and directional controls (to switch between the three lanes - this really was slot car racing after all). When you wanted to slow down you just stopped pressing the throttle!

There were several nice tweakable options like being able to change the gravity used in the game (from Earth to Pluto... Pluto if you liked watching your car/bike disappear off the screen for an hour when you reached the crest of a jump or a hill) but what made this game great was the shelf life of it. You could spend literally hours with the game getting a great amount of satisfaction making wilder and wilder track designs to race on.