Greetings and welcome to another game review here on the Gaming on AmigaOS 4.1 blog. 🙂

Today we’re going to have a look at a remake of an old classic, namely Road Fighter by Konami. The original one was released back in December 1984. It was Konami’s first racing game made for the arcades and it was ported to the MSX and NES later on.

This remake was made by Santi Ontanon (code), Miika Poikela (graphics), Jorrith Schaap (music). It was ported to AmigaOS 4 by ToAks.

RoadFighter should run on all AmigaOS 4 releases, including emulation in WinUAE.

Installation

First we need to get hold of the game. It is free and can be downloaded from OS4Depot, your number one place for AmigaOS 4 files. Please click on the link to grab it right away:

http://os4depot.net/share/game/driving/roadfighter.lha

Installation is straight forward. After downloading, enter the directory of the file and then right-click on the icon and select “extract to”. Select the destination and the files will be unpacked there. Once done, enter the game directory and double-click on the RoadFighter icon. The game will then start.

Gameplay

When you start the game, you’ll be presented with menu where you can select either 1 player or 2 players, options or quit. In the 2-player mode, you’ll have a vertical split-screen.

After selecting the amount of players, you have three levels to choose from:

• Game A:
  The easiest and most suitable for people new to the game.
• Game B:
  This is for advanced players. The level is hard to complete.
• Game C:
  According to the authors, this level is very, very difficult.

To control the vehicle, you only need to use three different keys. These are the left and right arrow buttons for directions and the spacebar to increase speed. You can return to the menu by pressing “Escape” or restart by pressing “Backspace”. F1 puts the game on pause.

The aim of the game is to reach the checkpoints before your car runs out of fuel. It has 6 different stages and in each one you are met with plenty of obstacles. Examples are slippery patches of oil, rocks, various types of cars with difference in behavior, and water. Your fuel burns out quickly, so be sure to grab as many pink hearts as possible. These will increase your fuel level.

I must admit that the game is pretty hard and definitely not easy to complete, especially in the hardest mode. I crashed several times into other cars and obstacles. It is a challenging top-down racer.

As you can see from the screenshot below, the graphics looks pretty good I think. 🙂

So, is this remake of Road Fighter worth trying? I definitely believe so. The archive itself does not take up more than 6 MB of space, it is easy and quick to install, and learning how to play it (controls) does not take long. If you’re interested in a quick classic racing game experience on AmigaOS 4, this one should be on your list. 🙂