Death Rally

Death Rally is a top-down perspective racing video game developed by Remedy (Remedy also created the Max Payne series), published by Apogee (Duke Nukem, which explains why there is a character named Duke Nukem in this game) and distributed by GT Interactive (Doom, Driver and more). It was released on September 6, 1996 on DOS and Windows.

This is one of those games that doesn't have a story, but only has pure action. Your goal is to reach the first spot out of 20 drivers. When you've completed that goal you may try the final race against the Adversary. When you start this game you'll be asked if you want to use weapons, and I suggest that you use them, because it makes the game a lot funnier. When you begin the game all drivers have more points than you, and Duke Nukem/Sam Speed is 100 points ahead of you. You can choose an avatar, when you choose Duke Nukem, Sam Speed will be the fastest driver, when you choose Sam Speed, Duke Nukem is, but when you choose another avatar they both are there, but Duke Nukem will have the fastest and strongest car, so choosing his avatar is the best thing to do. There are a couple of cars in the game, you'll start with a Vagabond (a Volkswagen Beetle in real life) and for purchasing other cars you'll need money by winning races and completing sub objectives. There are a couple sub objectives that can appear before you start a race. Sometimes you need to pick up some drugs and also win the race to get some extra cash and sometimes you have to kill one particular racer. However, when you fail these objectives you'll lose the amount of money that you were offered when you succeeded, so you'll have to be sure that the objective is possible. The better your car is, the more bonus money you'll gain if you complete one of the sub objectives. You can also win extra cash by eliminating the three other racers or winning the race without getting damaged.

You can also use the money to purchase some upgrades for your car. For example, the Vagabond has one engine upgrade (which makes it faster), two tire upgrades (which increases the handling of the car) and one armor upgrade (you take less damage from mines and machine gun fire). You'll also need to repair your car after each race, because if you don't do that the damage from the previous race still is there and most likely you'll be eliminated, and thus you've no income that race. You have three types of races in which you can subscribe (Note: there are only four starting tickets for each race and there are 20 racers, so not everybody is able to race) : Easy, medium and hard. The harder a race is, the faster are your rivals, but you'll also win more price money. Before you pick a race you're also able to install some one time only upgrades on your car. You can install mines, spikes on your front, rocket fuel and you can sabotage the best ranked racer so that his/her car is already damaged before the race starts. It can happen that you've ran out of money and that your car is 100% damaged. When this happens you can take a loan. You have three races to pay back the loan with a large amount of interest.

While you're racing you're also able to pick up some extra items that are laying on the ground, like extra ammunition for your machine gun, extra power for your turbo, drugs (which you don't want to pick up) mines (from you or other racers, ether way, you don't want to drive over these things, they can cause a lot of damage, depending on your armor level) and cash, the harder the race is, the more cash you'll gain with one pickup.

Considering this game is from 1996, it has amazing graphics, the environment is in 3D! However, your car is not, so let's call this game 2.5D. Level design is okay. When you're racing you realize that your opponents are much stronger than you, because when you hit them you mostly end up against a wall.

I really think this game is great, and it is just awesome. Man, this is one of those games that you can play hours and hours without stopping. The races are short, so after each race you think: Let's do another one, and before you know it it's dark outside. And this story gets even greater: This game was updated for modern operating systems and re-released as freeware by Remedy in 2009.