Subtitles section Play video
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There was a period, right in the swing of the 16-bit era, where one resounding thought
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echoed throughout the gaming industry: WHEN IN DOUBT, MAKE IT AN RPG. Don’t question
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it. You can jam in some sort of numbers-based progression system. You can add cute mascot
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characters. You can dance if you want to... I’m sorry. Shining Scorpion has the hallmarks
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of an RPG: Large, emotive sprites, towns to walk around, crap to buy and sell. But you’re
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not saving princesses or collecting monsters. No, this game’s about slot-car racing. Honestly.
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I cannot make this up.
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Now, slot-car racing could be a really brainless game. You go forward. You can either have
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your finger on the “MOVE” trigger or not. That’s pretty much the size of it. After
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that, the excitement is in seeing cars fly off the track and hit your kid brother in
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the head, which is awesome until the crying starts and then you have to defuse that situation
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before mom finds out. In Shining Scorpion, though, this crap is taken UPMARKET. There’s
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a whole league of Mini-4-Wheel-Drive vehicles - because the first thing you do to take yourself
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upmarket is come up with a new name for the sport that no one recognizes - and each machine
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is fine-tuned for performance. You can install new batteries, new motors, new wheels, and
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new bumpers, each with a different weight, output, radius in some cases, coefficient
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of friction... This is some hardcore number crunching. And that’s really the game’s
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saving grace, as the control after you actually get into a race is just “on” or “off.”
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By and large, the results of the race are determined before the engines are turned on:
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You either have a statistical advantage or you don’t.
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But that’d be missing the real purpose of the game: to generate interest in Tamaya’s
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existing line of Mini4WD cars, which they’ve been making since 1982. That’s right, not
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only is this a weird, eclectic video game, it’s based on an actual, weird, eclectic
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hobby! A quick internet search indicates that, yes, people still do race these things. They’ve
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outlasted the Super Famicom, that much is for certain. So it’s not very interactive,
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there’s not much action, and it’s largely a marketing ploy. But it invites experimentation
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and design, and if you really like it, there are apparently other people in the community,
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driving little motorized things and hoping that their stabilizers hold up. So while it
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might not be the best racing game of the 16-bit era, it may just be the best racer-designing
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game. Which is a whole ‘nother kettle of transmission fluid entirely.
