This week’s free game: ‘Super Off Road’
Are you a gamer? Do you like free things? Of course you do!
We here at the Tech Deck are just like you: poor gamers looking for cheap entertainment. And nothing's cheaper than cost-free gaming. Each week, we'll bring you a title (or two or three) you can legally play at home without plopping down a single dollar. If you see games you think we should be featuring on the blog, email us at dang@spokesman.com or kiph@spokesman.com.
How's this for nostalgia? Leland Corporation's "Super Off Road" competed to gobble all my Chuck E. Cheese tokens from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle arcade game in the early 1990s, and now you can play it for free, in your browser, thanks to the Internet Archive! Click below to play this 1992 masterpiece of top-down racing goodness, sans the wheel and pedal.
The sound quality isn't the best, and the arrow keys aren't as responsive as I would have liked. But the game, one of my favorites of the genre as I mentioned in a post a few weeks back, is still enjoyable. Here's the default controls for your PC:
1 - START
ARROW KEYS - Steering
CTRL - A button
SPACE - B button
ALT - C button
P - Pause
TAB - Options
The goal of the game is to finish the season with as much money as possible. You start with $100K to purchase upgrades for your racer, and finishing higher on each track awards you more money.
Go inside the blog to learn more about this oft-ported classic of the arcades.
Super Off Road saw many iterations, thanks to licensing deals with various off-road personalities. After an initial arcade release in 1989, versions for most of the major home consoles - NES, Super Nintendo, Sega, Game Boy and the Atari consoles - followed. The version above is the 1992 release on the Sega Genesis, which removed the likeness of Ivan "Ironman" Stewart, an off-road racer who graced the cover of the Super Nintendo port.
The Leland Corporation, who produced the original cabinet, went out of business in 1994, selling the rights to their properties to legendary pinball corporation Williams Manufacturing. Ports of Super Off Road and its sequels have appeared on Midway arcade compilations for home consoles like the Playstation and Xbox.
Check back next week for another free game that probably didn't cause as many of my childhood tears as this one.
