The four different courses offer different sorts of off-roadish elements to fight against, which you can prepare for prior to the actual race - that is, IF you choose any of the three higher difficulty levels. The simulation elements have more to do with how to get yourself out of off-roadish troubles, like fixing your car from spare parts, refueling it when there are no gas stations around, looking at a map to see if there are any shorter routes available to preserve gas, and so forth. hm, well, yes, it's not a proper off-roader as such, but these roads are built on varyingly hazardous bits of land, which sometimes contain watery bits, often contain pieces of wood and rocks and whatnot, which will make your car bounce off in various ways, and crashes are also to be expected. The racing itself happens in an Outrun-like 3rd person view, but being an off-road game, you will be driving through roads. Adding any simulation-like elements would easily make any such game unique and interesting at the time, so 4x4 ORR certainly fit into its very own slot. What 4x4 ORR attempts to be is an off-road racing simulator in a way that hadn't been seen before, which wasn't all that much of a stretch, since off-road racers, as they were, were not a particularly over-utilized genre to begin with. Fairly similar scores all over, with a slight advantage to the C64 version, but let's see how it turns out. The DOS version seems the only one with more of a presence, as 3047 voters at Abandonia have given it a similar score of 2.7 from 5.0, while the site editor has given it a 3.0. The score at CPC-Softs is similarly mediocre 11 out of 20, and only 2 users at Generation-MSX have voted their version to get a 3 stars out of 5 rating. At World of Spectrum, 21 voters have given their version a score of 5.53. The C64 version has a score of 6.7 from 53 votes at Lemon64, while its 16-bit counterpart has a 5.17 from 30 votes. While getting fairly good reviews at the time of release, time hasn't been particularly kind on this game. It also stands as a clear turning point in the company's success story. Mysteries notwithstanding, 4x4 ORR is one of the last big Epyx titles that (probably) originated on the C64, before the company turned their focus on creating games for the Atari Lynx while importing European games to the U.S. Another mystery regarding this game is, that some websites (such as MobyGames and Wikipedia) claim that it was also released for the Atari ST, when little exploration is needed to prove this claim false. was a short lived team, who were only responsible for developing four Epyx releases in 1988, all of which were somehow sports related. It's also one of the most mysterious Epyx games, since not much is known about the people involved in the making of practically any other version apart from the C64 and Spectrum ones, the former of which I'm rather certain is the original, since it actually does offer a proper Epyx-type credits sequence. Besides, it's about time an Epyx game, that is not part of their multi-event sports series, is featured on the blog.Ĥx4 Off-Road Racing isn't nearly one of the better known or popular Epyx games, but it is one of the more interesting titles. So, this presented a puzzle for a long while, until the answer was presented to me by a reader called Zaltys on the 5th of June 2020 - thanks again for the suggestion, and sorry for the delay! Not only does this bring another game into the numerals in the comparisons archive, but it also gives me a chance to really dive into a game I've long meant to, but have always postponed it due to lack of inspiration and time. But now that the comparison of Exploding Fist is done, the next logical step (if such logic exists) would be an Epyx game, but I didn't want to write about any of the other sport games quite yet, nor about Impossible Mission, because I've never really understood it, and there are just too many versions to bother with it. Since restarting the comparison blog in late 2019, I've been trying to avoid writing about games that are bound to be heavy work for a comparison. Published for Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, IBM-PC compatibles, MSX and Sinclair ZX Spectrum by Epyx for the North American market, and U.S. Sinclair ZX Spectrum version written by Steve Marsden and David Cooke. Programming by Paul Nickels, Joe Simko, Ed Schoenberg, Steve Thomas and K-Byte
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