Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.
i like the game. been looking for the upright version for a few months now.
The compact upright version uses a standard resolution monitor. The cockpit version uses the medium rez. I have the compact upright version and it is a blast to play. --Rich
As a gamer from all the way back (Pong to now, essentially - I have played every arcade game I had the opportunity to play from there to here and owned Atari 2600, 5200, 7800, Atari 800 computer, Atari ST computer, Vectrex, NES, SNES, Genesis, 3DO, TG16, N64, Gamecube, PSX, PS2, Wii, Gameboy, GBA, NDS, and later on Magnavox and a few other odds and ends and having owned and restored about 50 arcade games and pinball machines and having built from scratch 3 MAME cabs ......)
Heck, I even hold high scores on my Hallmark ornament machines (ha, ha).
I can say among the bottom two car games I have ever played are Hard Drivin' and Race Drivin'.
Man, do I hold a passionate hatred for both those games. Around the same time those two games were hanging on by a thread in the arcades, the first iteration of Test Drive on the PC 286 PC came out and it blew the arcade games away in terms of driver freedom and customization. Those two Atari car driving games suck harder than an industrial vacuum cleaner.
To get a good idea of Hard Drivin' or Race Drivin' on the state of the art arcade version, play Flight Simulator 1 on an IBM PC running at 4.77 mHz.
This is a bad game. No joy comes from either HD or RD. And as much as I hate the dumbing down of racing arcade games that led to California Speed or Need for Speed in the arcade, more fun can be had from ANY version of Need for Speed than could ever be wrenched forcibly with any Satanic ritual helper from any Atari racing game. These games were abysmal. Hard driving makes you yearn for an appendectomy and Race Drivin makes you think you are riding a soap box derby car with tar as a wheel lube, and you still have to make a loop.
Need for Speed on Nintendo DS is better than Race Drivin' and Need for Speed on DS is what we'll all play in hell after we die. A terrible, terrible game. But better than Hard Drivin' or Race Drivin' in a pristine clean fully working arcade cockpit with mint force feedback.
There you go, no more beating around the bush. How anyone could ever want either of the Atari driving games from the early 80's boggles my mind. And I worship Atari games.
Here's an idea that goes against conventional wisdom but is inherently "good" in this context....buy the game, then MAME it or MULTI it.
Make a GOOD driving game of it.
Kill that Satanically bad 1 frame per second slideshow crap driving game.
That is a bit to much, especially when you start talking about Need for Speed, and California Speed. Both are terrible racing games. Not to mention not even in the same class of racing game (simulator vs. arcade racer).
The Drivin' games are fun. If you really like racing games you'll appreciate and enjoy them. Hard Drivin' was the first racing game to use a force feedback steering wheel which means the wheel is driven with a belt and a motor so you feel the weight and momentum of the car fighting just like a real car. Think of it as if Ferrari 355 Challenge came out in 1989.