Speed Racer X

Time for another pit stop. From the course thumbnails, it looks like things might be toned down a little, with the tracks looking a bit more basic in their shapes save for the last of the next set.

The next car upgrade is another big one, allowing the car to pick up items regardless of speed. This does throw out the interesting dynamic of whether or not it's worth it to slow down or not, especially in situations like track #10 with its items precariously placed between moving barriers.

Although it does certainly influence what makes power-up placement on tracks good or not, I do have to admit it feels like a real upgrade to your car. A limitation has been removed, and it's not like this is a change happening early on in the game. There are just eight tracks to go by this point, and it serves as another way to mix things up.

Going into this next set, I was curious how power-ups would be placed and how I'd feel about them if the item upgrade hadn't been given.

Perhaps we'll never know. Oddly after the previous set did a great job of starting with tracks that really benefited from the car having its latest improvement, this one neglects power-ups entirely, instead finally introducing "shredders", which decelerate the car if if passes next to them.

It's not the most fun obstacle to deal with, but it does introduce another layer of complexity.

Oddly enough the shredders only shred in two directions, with the one up top checking if the car is south or east, and the bottom one checking north and west. This goes with the flow of the track, but it isn't quite clear given the use of double arrows which both do nothing if you ram the car directly into the pointy part.

The turns also get very dramatic on this one. The turn after the narrow checkpoint spot is particularly nasty with how many changes in direction are needed to get through. As for the shredders, they're much easier to avoid on this introductory course where there's a wide berth to get around them safely.

I have to admit the billboard is well designed here, even if the message ain't great.

Race fourteen does some good work with the shredder placement.

Now they're something to deal with when making turns. You're stuck either taking the hit or steering for just a little longer and hoping to not crash into the walls. There's also a mixture of shredders and moving walls, though this combination feels underutilized. If there was a choice to be made between avoiding a wall but hitting a shredder there might be something to this, but in practice, it's just always hoping your car gets past the wall on the side away from the shredder.

Once again the slower moving walls from their introduction would've worked out better.

Things get simpler on track fifteen with the lack of moving walls. Despite this, it's still a challenging course!

Here the shredders are placed a lot more deviously with the two along the bottom requiring some very precise movement to avoid hitting and more quick maneuvers to be made if you do get past them successfully. It's an improvement over the previous one as the random element of the walls is replaced with challenging your driving skills. With 19 seconds left on the clock at the finish line, it's also one where missteps can be costly!

The final track for this set is way too bland visually. This one is just begging for a nice billboard either in the top right or in the center. It eschews all obstacles and power-ups and simply challenges the player with a very narrow path and some jagged turns with the end of the lap being particularly harrowing.

This course might not be the best to look at, but it really is the toughest yet. When you crash, you need to accelerate ASAP, but you also probably need to turn quite quickly as well! It makes for some very frantic recoveries all throughout the video with a lot of mistakes and time wasted.

This is the final set of races! As much as I felt like I was ignoring these little previews, having them actually removed really does make you wonder what to expect.

The final upgrade is just an extra 10 seconds of race time, which feels very unsubstantial compared to the others, but there aren't a whole lot of options left at this point.

The time calculation also really goes wild here, and sadly, the rest of the game will soon follow.

"Hey why's this video only 13 seconds long?"

...welp.

So unfortunately, there's a bug where if you hit a zip and it can't move the car you get stuck in an endless loop. This isn't unique to this track, but this one makes it very easy to do.

Even without the soft-lock, this track is an utter disaster for me. Just completing the first lap is a nightmare for me. The moving walls that actually cover some space are finally back, but due to the short distance between them and the southern edge of the track, boosting past them is a much more dangerous proposition.

This course is also bugged in that it forgets to give the player some ammo to use their boosts! I opted to cheat for ammo since the three boosts were still given, just unusable.

The eastern shredder looks unavoidable, but it does omit the east space for its checks to see if the car is next to itself. So the proper way to get past is to veer south just before crashing, steer around it, and then get back on track. No thank you. The straightaway above it offers enough time to just take the hit and re-accelerate which should be faster just by the number of tiles needed to cross.

Of course, the track switchers mean that this is an every-other-lap situation. Somehow the shredderless path feels worse.

Race eighteen goes from bad to worse. The car doesn't move at all rendering this entire track broken!

The culprit here is ZZT's own editor which has a bug where object's code will sometimes be deleted entirely. Yes, that car has no code at all.

Now this is an easy fix, just copy the car from another race. One hot-fix later and the course can be played properly. Well, almost. There's nothing on the track to give the player their three boosts either!

Which is a shame because this is a very very tough track to get through without any.

Also Ed has finally remembered that pushable boulders are supposed to be an obstacle in this game. To be fair, I also forgot about them until just now. There really isn't a whole lot to them. Smash directly into them and hit accelerate. Once you push the boulder out of the way it's just another wall.

Everything is out in full force to cause as many crashes as possible. Challenging turns, moving walls, an awkwardly placed shredder, and some rough routes with the track switchers. Unsurprisingly I don't manage to finish the race in time on this one.

The next attempt also ends in failure! It was only on this 3rd attempt with a working car that I was able to get through it!

A nasty spill around 1:20 definitely had me worried though. Really I was tense this entire race. It was a close call for sure.

The trend of these finally tracks is bugs. This time it's minor with a lap skipper power-up being blocked by a wall and thinking it's the car and immediately being picked up.

Not shown: The two attempts where I soft-lock on the third zip within 20 seconds of starting the race.

For this one, the first shredder is a bit of a red herring as the speed boost from the zip makes it possible to get past without slowing down at all. There is a question of whether or not to take the time to push the boulders, but the layout of the course makes it far easier to just get your car lined up properly to thread the needle between them each time.

Aside from that, this course feels toned down a lot more compared to the way the game's had this sudden spike in difficulty. Admittedly, the previous track would've been easier to get through in time with boosts that the player is meant to have.

Then for the final track the engine is busted again! This time the car is fine, but the object that detects laps is broken with the jump to a label named :lap normally somehow being replaced with a jump to a label that doesn't exist named :c!

One code fix later and I was off to the races. Or so I thought.

Because this track has another fatal bug. That very first shredder is checking if it's blocked to the north, which it always will be, meaning that your car is forever decelerating! There's no chance of finishing the course at the lowest speed (and good luck making the turns when the controls are that unresponsive) requiring yet another fix. In my case I just got rid of the tile above the shredder since there'd be no reason to put the car there in the first place.

All that and it still wasn't easy to complete. A previous attempt fell apart quickly after I boosted too late past the boulders and just kind of took the rest of the lap at low speed before feeling safe to accelerate again, something that I knew was going to be a big waste of time and not worth continuing with.

The moving walls here are a prime spot for boosting, but everything is still narrow enough that you're not going to get completely through no matter what you do.

This one is just rough all around opening with shredders that require accepting or some extremely tight turns to get past and then a horizontal stretch before the cluster of walls that overextends so you need to make a U-turn if you miss the turn! It's the final course for a reason even if it doesn't quite look as brutal as it feels.

But after 20 racers, and a few disasters, the racing is over. Your final time will be (wildly inaccurately at this point) calculated and then you can proceed to the credits.

The credits take the approach of just a single board with everything written out using text before a final popup explains that your score is meant to be read with hours in the thousands and hundreds columns and minutes in the tens and ones. I don't think 30 hours is accurate. Perhaps minutes and seconds was the intent.

And then you unlock the SECRET LEVEL provided your time is low enough. The threshold is to beat the game in less than... 35 hours. I'm way more confident now that this is supposed to be minutes. Adding up my video times in this article for successfully completed track brings me to a total of 38 minutes 12 seconds. Given the inaccuracy of the timer, the extra time at the start and end of each video, plus the power-ups that reduce your _overall_ time, it seems to match up decently.

Of course with the broken calculation somewhere, it might be impossible to not unlock it.

Yes, for the grand finale there's a destruction derby map where you now get to shoot up some other cars! Items are replaced with a gun that's fired by pressing south. Your car is locked at maximum speed and has no time limit to take out the rest of the cars.

It's... not very good. I mean, the idea is fine, but this is something that ZZT can't really handle. The CPU cars steer by just rotating the player controls which can for a few seconds seem like it works until you end up steering them into a corner where they pretty much stop. The strategy is less to use your car to shoot the opponents and more to use the shared controls to steer them into the wall of bullets bouncing around the arena. Your own car doesn't do much more than provide more bullets for those ricochets.

Once the cars are destroyed, the game ends.