I used to have a lot of fun with a somewhat rare driving game, it involved racing in big 3D outdoor areas. I think I remember desert, snowy areas, and lots of trees and cliffs. I think it was DOS or 16-bit Windows. It supported multiplayer by direct TCP/IP I think. There were different types of races, I remember best the checkpoint races where the checkpoints were big gates that were randomly placed on the landscape, and I think you had a big arrow pointing you to the next one.
I think there was realistic car damage (perhaps optional), where you could lose wheels and things so that your car handling and speed greatly suffered, but that could have been another game.
It wasn’t a big-name game, not Test Drive or even published by a big publishing company IIRC. I want to say it had a different name in the USA than it did in Europe. Might have started with a C? Ring a bell for anyone?
There was an older similar game called Big Red Racing, but I don’t think it had as much flexibility.
1NSANE? Big 3D outdoor areas with deserts, snow, or cliffs, multiplayer, big gate checkpoints with an arrow pointing at the next, and cumulative damage that could result in wheels falling off.
Yep, that’s it! 1nsane was published around 2000 by Codemasters, looks like the developers were in Hungary. It still looks pretty decent today, it even supports the highest resolution my monitor will support. Here’s a gameplay video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16j8EwYbYoM
I’m thinking there was an even older DOS game that was like it, but I doubt it would hold up well today.
Did you play the sequel? If so how does it compare?
A friend and I played 1nsane last night. It wasn’t easy getting connected though, I forgot the joy of port forwarding and all that. He has a much faster connection but I never could get connected to him. He was able to connect to me though.
It’s still a lot of fun, the graphics scale up to 1650x1080 pretty well, the main thing is they are just sparse, not a lot of detail. A few low-res textures really stand out.
I had downloaded a bunch of custom maps and vehicles. We played a bunch of races. One of them was a killer off-road course called Belgium or something. Lots of really bumpy hill-climbing terrain, it must have taken 20 minutes to make a lap, getting stuck many times and sometimes sliding down a hillside and having to find a way back up.
The 4WD modeling and vehicle damage modeling are a lot of fun. We were racing Bigfoot trucks and I managed to lose the left front wheel, then the right rear wheel. Funny thing was it still drove pretty well that way.
I wish it had AI drivers in multiplayer, I don’t know why that’s so rare in games.
I have the sequel, yes. Basically the same as the original but with updated graphics and new maps. The sequel has four different regions (Eurasia, North America, Africa, and Antartica) and each have five possible maps. All events seem to have been carried over except Destruction Zone, as noted above.
I’ve deleted your link. I acknowledge that you were trying to be helpful in providing the link, but it led to an abandonware site where the game could have been downloaded in violation of its’ copyright. “Abandonware” means that the copyright is undefended, but it still exists and we have to be mindful of these things.
Thanks to Lute Skywatcher for providing a clean link.
