Review: F1 Race for Game Boy

For? Nintendo Game Boy  Who? Nintendo  Year? 1990

I’ve never actually owned an original Game Boy, never needed to. That’s one good aspect of Nintendo being the huge cash cow that they are. Up until when I recently bought a Game Boy Advance SP I only owned a Game Boy Color and a DS. These together meant I could play every single hand held Nintendo game to come out up until the recently released 3DS.
The only reason I bought an SP was so I could play my GB and GBC games with a front lit screen and a rechargeable battery. All the other Game Boys are useless in my opinion unless you’re a hardcore GB collector.
A good thing about the front lit screen is now I can actually take screen shots in the dark and I don’t have to worry about light reflection. Next step will be to buy either a SNES or a Gamecube so I can get the adapters in which let you play the games on the telly so I can capture them perfectly with a DVD Recorder.
What I’m trying to say though is don’t complain about the screen captures as they could be a lot worse. I’m just a small time Blogspot blogger ;)

F1 Race, to put bluntly, is a fun arcade racing game but is ball bustlingly hard.
I’ve never played such a hard racer. It doesn’t muck around with even starting off easy, it just chucks you right into the action.

You have the choice of three modes; Grand Prix, Time Trails and Multi-Play.
Grand Prix is pretty much the career mode. You’re tasked with coming first place in every single race in different locations around the world. You start off in tenth place and have to make it to first by the end, the first eight cars are pretty much just obstacles with the first car being what makes it so challenging. Its usually half way around the track in front of you and all the other cars. How it even gets there in the first place is beyond me but it seems a little unfair, all the other cars are bunched together at the start so its seems a bit unbalanced in that regard.
The other cars are also track hogs and take up all the space which makes them close to impossible to overtake while going around a bend. You do have an interesting boost function though which I would recommend you use whenever you’re on a straight part. I’ve never heard of Nitrogen Boosters in F1 racing but it makes it that little bit easier, so I’m not complaining.
The Time Trails are a bit easier on the rage meter, you have the choice of either doing them with or without ‘obstacles’ (ie other cars) and you can choose whatever track you want from the start.
I haven’t had a chance to try out the Multi-Play mode as I don’t know anyone one with the game. It did originally come with a four player adapter though which is pretty neat. The game would be a great multiplayer game as the tracks are carefully planned and the car handling is fairly flawless, its only the AI which brings this game down.

The graphics are quite well done. All the different tracks are in different places around the world and the backgrounds have been made specially for each track, there are no generic background illustrations of hills in this game. For example in Russia they have those, uh, Russian looking buildings (sorry about the ignorance Russian readers!) and in India they have the Taj Mahal. There is quite a lot of detail crammed in.

Those 'Russian' looking buildings

I experienced no kind of lag either so it just goes to show how lazy some of the artists must of been back in the day, it can’t have anything to do with the capabilities of the Game Boy.

The music is quite enjoyable as well but the sound department gets let down by the sound effects as they’re loud, repetitive and annoying. I actually ended up completely turning the sound off as it just distracted me and put me off the game a little.

All in all F1 Race is a great game. Good graphics, great music and fun handling makes this game a must buy if you have a Game Boy.
The only thing that brings this game down is of how unforgiving it is, this ruins it unless you’re totally a hardcore gamer. This isn’t a game in which you can just pick up and play, considering its just a racing game though I think you should be able to do that. That’s just my humble opinion though.