MegaRace is a car combat game from 1994 for MS-DOS and happens to be one of my favorite games. It is surprising how the game has withstood the test of time and is still fun to play to this day. Review following the break.

The story of MegaRace is thus. You are a contestant on a future TV show where you must race on a track and defeat all of your opponents before you complete three laps and the race is over. It’s similar to The Running Man where it is a kill or be killed environment, except it’s all virtual reality so nobody really dies. Your opponents in these races are street gangs local to the planet/city you are racing on. As you defeat them, you unlock the ability to use their cars in races, each with their own ups and downs. You defeat enemies on the racetrack by catching up to them and using your hood mounted gun to shoot them up. If you run out of bullets you can also ram you enemies, but you need to be careful that you don’t loose health and die in the process,

The racing mechanics themselves are very easy. You only need to remember five buttons: accelerate, brake, left, right, and shoot. On the track are different symbols. One is the traditional arrow which gives you a speed boost, and another is a ladder looking symbol that gives you a point bonus. Both symbols have a grayed out version which does the opposite, slows you down dramatically or takes away points. There are various other symbols that do things such as refilling your health, ammo, etc. So besides navigating the track to catch up to your enemies, you also have to watch out where you are driving or else you may hit a gray arrow and slow down dramatically.

The backgrounds of the tracks are all pre-rendered in 3-D. The game takes you to different locations such as cityscapes, underwater (as seen above), and various other future destinations. One track that I remember being particularly cool was one later in the game that had a gigantic loop in it like a roller coaster that you drove on.

And who can forget Christian Erickson’s amazing role as “Lance Boyle”, the host of MegaRace. Between missions he will suck up to the viewers and belittle you. Here are some of his words of wisdom early on in the game:

So you say, ‘Somebody ought to DO something about them criminal highway gangs!’ And VWBT says, ‘Oh yeah?! Well, why don’t YOU do something, mister big-mouth!’. You don’t have the car? We’ll give you the car! You don’t want to get arrested for taking the law into your hands? Not a problem! You know why? Because it AIN’T REAL! It’s a whole lot better than real, baby! It’s virtual television: reality’s worst nightmare!

All of Boyle’s parts are full motion video and are quite humorous. You have to hand it to Christian Erickson though. He came back to play Lance in both sequels for MegaRace, and has been in a number of other video games since then such as Siberia II and Indigo Prophecy.

Did I mention the soundtrack to this game is amazing. Each track has its own unique song which fits the theme of them well. The sounds effects for the racing and combat are also top notch and I have no problems with any of them. They are as fitting as they can be for a futuristic car combat game for DOS.

I would very much like to find and play MegaRace 2 and 3. I’ve never even seen copies of them, although then again I’ve never seen a copy of MegaRace other than the one I own. The only reason I own MegaRace is because it was packaged with Packard Bell computers in the early 90’s. If anyone has played MegaRace 2 and 3, feel free to mention it in the comments, I’d like to hear how they are, especially 3. Both sequels are made by Cryo Interactive and as I already mentioned, Christian Erickson comes back as Lance Boyle for both.

I conclusion, I would heartily recommend MegaRace to everyone who gets the ability to play it. It is still fun to play to this day. The only thing that may get in people’s way is the fact that their computers may not be able to run DOS games. I’m running Windows Vista and the game works perfectly in DOSBox 0.71. So if you’re having trouble running it in the Command Prompt I’d say use DOSBox.

If you’re interested in the game, and in supporting our blog, you can buy MegaRace from Amazon through us.