Friday 15 July 2011

Racing games, or the lack of

It surprises me a bit that there are so few racing/driving games available for the GP2X. The OHH archive lists only about half a dozen (for some reason a completely unrelated PocketSNES adaptation is also in that category...) which is pretty disappointing for such a popular genre. I'm sure the hardware would be easily capable of running a port of the top-down racer GeneRally, for example, which is a very nice game indeed -- albeit with one idiotic bit of licensing.1

Yes, there are plenty of console and computer racing games if you want to go the emulation route, but it surprises me that so little has been written for the console natively. Of course I'm not a good enough programmer to be able to tell whether there's a particular reason for this, but it seems very odd that even 2D racers are so notable by their absence. It's probably too late for this to change now, but it seems worth a quick mention just in case someone's got something special up their sleeve!

1When you go to download GeneRally from the official site, you're told that by downloading it you agree to the terms in the readme file... which you obviously can't have seen yet!

1 comment:

  1. That does seem very surprising! After all, the original version of Grand Theft Auto, while not my kind of thing, was really not much more than a top-down game. So I'd imagine that something a little more basic could be done quite easily, where you can race a car around a city or a 2D race track. If, as we discussed, the GP2X can handle scrolling and it's reasonably smooth, I can't really see it being impossible to write such a game. :)

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