Racing game fans who’ve been around since the SNES era are likely to be familiar with the Top Gear series. Developed by Gremlin Graphics (later Gremlin Interactive) as the SNES equivalent of its Lotus games on other consoles, it’s the closest Nintendo’s 16-bit system got to its own version of Sega’s classic arcade game Out Run.
Now Top Gear and its sequel are back – though not by that name – in Top Racer Collection and while their return will no doubt be a joy for the grizzled veterans who remember it from back in the day, those discovering them for the first time may be better suited to the more modern equivalents which hold up a little better.
First things first, there’s no mention of the Top Gear name here anywhere. Presumably to avoid issues with the BBC and its Top Gear TV show – after all, copyright lawyers are even more trigger-happy these days than they were in the ‘90s – the three games on offer here instead have their Japanese titles of Top Racer, Top Racer 2, and Top Racer 3000. And yes, we know there are actually four games in this compilation but we’ll get to that.
All three games have a similar concept: pick a car, start at the back of a grid of racers, and try to navigate your way through the sea of vehicles to reach the front by the end of the final lap. Longer tracks have you running out of fuel, which is dealt with by pitting out or running over on-track elements, depending on the game.
In case it wasn’t clear by its title, it’s Top Gear 3000 – sorry, Top Racer 3000 – which offers the biggest changes, because it ditches the modern locations in favour of a futuristic setting with tracks set across 12 fictional planets and has you driving cars that go at speeds of up to 330mph (but which still look suspiciously like cars from 1000 years earlier). That aside, though, once you’ve mastered one of the games you don’t need to adopt a wildly different set of skills to master the others, since they’re pretty similar.
This new compilation gets around the lack of Top Gear branding (not to mention the first game’s annoyingly abstract main menu) by presenting its own bespoke menu system which replaces those of the original games. You select your campaign, quick race, or time trial modes, pick a car, choose your transmission, and enter your name all through this new menu, and only switch to the emulator when the race is about to start. It’s somewhat jarring and not without some oddly unnecessary loading screens at times, but it at least works.
What doesn’t work at the moment, however, is the game’s online mode. Although it’s possible to create and join rooms for online multiplayer races, neither option has proved successful for us so far and as such we haven’t been able to test a single online race. Of course, this may change once the game is actually released, but we’re now seven years into the Switch’s life, and developers are still insistent on spending time and resources adding online modes to games that frankly don’t need them and aren’t guaranteed to sell enough copies to make proper use of them.
Given that the games use emulation, there are a few basic options regarding screen size and filters you’d usually expect from similar compilations, but there are some issues here. The ‘Original’ size option, which multiplies the original game’s screen resolution by a whole number to avoid shimmering while scrolling, looks absolutely tiny when playing on handheld mode, meaning the only practical option there is to make it fit the screen vertically (though thankfully there isn’t much shimmering to be found here). The CRT filter is also a strange one because it adds a weird wobble effect to the picture that looks more like you’re watching the game on an old VHS tape than actually playing it on an old TV.
Another issue – albeit one that’s no fault of the compilation itself – is that every game on offer here has a choppy frame rate. When you turn on your boost and hit extremely high speeds, the scenery doesn’t really fly past you, it sort of slideshows past you. It can make controlling these sections a little difficult, but this was an issue with the original games, too, so it’s not like the emulation is the problem – it’s simply accurate to a fault.
One aspect of blame that can be levelled on the compilation, however, is the claim that it features four games. As well as the three Top Racer games, it also includes Top Racer Crossroads, which publisher QUByte has previously claimed is “brand new”. Frankly, this is 661 horsepowers of nonsense. Crossroads is merely a ROM hack of the first game, with the car sprites replaced by four different ones from the Horizon Chase series. The tracks are identical, the music is identical, it’s the same game.
Which brings us to our main recommendation. To be clear, this review reads mainly negative because anyone familiar with the original games will already know the enjoyment to be had there. They’re still good games in their own right, and nothing here changes that. If you buy this compilation, you’ll have a fun time with it. It’s just that many of the things that have been added – the odd menus, the pointless online mode, the subpar filter options, the decision to put a fake nose and glasses on the first game and pretend it’s a new fourth one – are disappointments.
If you’re a fan of the originals and just want an excuse to play them on your Switch, this is still worth a look because we can assure you that the gameplay itself hasn’t been messed with. The games you loved on the SNES are still the same games here, and there's still a lot of enjoyable racing action here.
Anyone else who doesn’t have those nostalgic ties with the series, however, would probably be better off buying Horizon Chase Turbo, which is the spiritual successor to the Top Gear series. It costs the same price and offers exactly the same sort of gameplay, but the music (which was made by the same composer) is so much catchier, it runs so much smoother, and it looks so much better.
Conclusion
Top Racer Collection is a solid compilation for fans of the Top Gear trilogy on SNES, but the originals' lower frame rate can really affect the action at high speeds. Nostalgics will find that everything is as it should be, and there's still plenty of fun to be had, but those without emotional ties to the series will want to go for the newer, better model instead and buy Horizon Chase Turbo.
Comments 50
Top Racer? LOL of all the BS.
Reminds of when Punch out came to Wii and they changed Piston Hondas name to piston Hondo.
@Truegamer79 Top Racer is what Top Gear is called in Japan. QUByte Interactive doesn't had the rights to the Top Gear copyright as the name was used by a tv show so they used the original Japanese name instead. $20 for this whole collection is a sweet deal though, would be even sweeter if the N64 and GBA Top Gear games were included but oh well we can't have everything.
Might pick this up when it's on sale, I still have my cartridge of the first game and play it regularly on my Super NT.
Why not have an option to improve the framerate? Is this really a cost cutting decision? Doesn't make any sense to me.🫠( Just to make it clear for people responding to my comment. I understand it's a lazy port and to improve the framerate would require effort)😁
@Faucet Yes but it's not cost cutting, it's costly. Remember they are not taking out frames, for these to achieve 60fps they had to overclock and add frames as these games are old games running at native framerates (30fps) meaning all frames the original had are all here already. For these games to run at 60fps the dev had to completely overclock each game to add more frames to the ones already existed, only by doing that will 60fps be achieve and unless the dev knows how to mod each game I doubt they want to delay it another few months just to add that though you never know they may patch it in the future.
@Serpenterror
I see. In some cases i definitely prefer the American name but with games like Mega Man the Japanese name is cooler. Also Biohazard is probably a better name than Resident Evil.
Removed - inappropriate
@FlashBoomerang lol, I know right?
@Faucet You can't just "improve the framerate" on old games, you need to change their source code. Given that they literally used a to hack in this collection, as well as bad filters, I'd say they didn't actually touch the games.
All that being said, a 7 seems really high for this. Honestly is the reviewer ever going to play this again?
I've been waiting for this release, but now I'm debating if I should just stick with Horizon. I picked that up a while back, and have had some good fun with it. Sometimes it's really hard to go back home again, and now I'm thinking this might be one of those times. I might put it on my wishlist in case it goes on sale.
@FlashBoomerang
you okay?
i have fond memories of renting 3000 on a weekend, but id take the n64 top gear games over the snes ones any day. i rented them more than once, and they were worth buying.
@Faucet It's not a lazy port. They're emulated, so it's literally the SNES games you're playing. They'd need to remake them from scratch basically to make them run at a different speed.
@FlashBoomerang Me down get what you mean by little window. These games are 4:3 aspect ratio evidence by the screenshots which basically full screen. I'm not sure it had pixel perfect but I'm sure full screen it there. Only it have doesn't wide screen.
@Truegamer79 I do agree in some cases the Japanese name could be better but in terms of Biohazard, I still think Resident Evil is the better name. To me Biohazard made it sound like a surgery game whereas Resident Evil like Evil Dead and Evil West actually make the title sounded more like a horror title.
Shame they couldn't get proper 60fps support like the M2 ports of OutRun on 3DS which also featured 3D visuals and other screen sizes
@Serpenterror
Yeah that's true.
@Serpenterror Most SNES games ran at 60fps, which was the native refresh rate of NTSC TVs. (The gist of interlacing is that it makes for a slightly fuzzy image, not a halved framerate- though most SNES games ran in progressive scan, making that largely irrelevant.)
But you're probably right that it can't be easily changed. There were some games that could flip between 30 and 60fps back then, without changing the game speed, but that was a rarity. Most of them were hard-coded to run at one rate or another- and deviating from that rate would cause the gameplay to speed up or slow down.
Oh, and regarding the aspect ratio, SNES games typically ran at 256x224, which works out to 8:7 in pixel counts. These games got stretched out to fill a 4:3 screen, of course, but that was analogue tech and didn't have shimmering. To avoid shimmering on modern hardware, you have to either use a bilinear (blur) filter, or do pixel perfect mode, which means the largest you can go on a docked Switch is 4x scale, or 1024x896. That's effectively "windowed", with black bars on all sides.
I never played these at the time, but seems the Lotus games ran smoother, certainly on the Amiga. I have one of these (the first one) on the Evercade and it did seem pretty jerky there, I'd not played SNES sequels so was hoping they'd be better. Scaling is always a problem and scanline filters are hit and miss... can you remove the artwork on the boarders though? I'd always rather just have a black screen to the sides with retro games.
I always thought that these games chugged along they were pretty choppy on SNES certainly when compared to the lotus games on the Amiga
@Truegamer79 «Also Biohazard is probably a better name than Resident Evil.»
It is a better title. Resident Evil sounds like something about demons or ghosts, not zombies (and mutants).
@Serpenterror
I loved these games and they're the reason I picked up Horizon, which I also love, so it's a bit of a conundrum for me. Hmmmm
@smoreon A refresh rate is not the same as fps (frames per seconds). Fps is the number of frames the game had and could produce within that short time, a 60hz refresh rate is the electrical standard that it could ran it at usually in Japan and NTSC territories. If a game had 60fps and it ran on 60hz then it'll be buttery smooth but if it's 60hz and doesn't had 60fps then it usually dip to 30fps or 25fps depending on how many frames exist when the game ran and if the hardware could handle it.
Remember Street Fighter II for Super NES in NA is very limited thus some games could only showcase around 25-35 frames at a time depending on contents but it's running on a 60hz electrical standard refresh rate so even though it's smooth it's not 60fps, if a game like SFII had 35 frames to use then it could only showcase 30 of those 35 frames thus 30fps. Whereas the arcade version had more frames probably more than 60fps (likely around 70-90 frames due to their larger memory capability) and it's running on a 60hz refresh rate so even if it doesn't show all the frames of animations, it manage to showcase 60 of them at one time thus 60fps.
Remember some Sega Saturn fighting games had some frame cut out when playing on the hardware, the real truth is those extra frames are already on the game disc just that the Sega Saturn system itself couldn't handle them so to keep those running at a playable 56-58fps. Using a Ram cartridge, it manage to unlock those extra frames to the game ramping the fps to 60fps complete with those extra frames added.
@Poodlestargenerica Yes, I am.
@scully1888 Fair enough, it was an honest question.
I had a bad feeling from screenshots that the Horizon Chase crossover was just going to be different vehicles to select in an otherwise unchanged Top Gear.
I'm okay with a rom hack, but there's not enough meat with that minor change. Needed more like at least a new country after you finish the original 8 regions, with a set of four original tracks (and ideally with 16-bit style SNES renditions of some of the music from Horizon Chase).
As for smoothness, I've personally always found these to be fine in that department in 1 and 2 player modes. I'd feel sorry for anyone that tries 4 person split-screen in 3000 though. While I've never played 3 or 4 person multiplayer in that game (never had a multi-tap), the attract mode shows it off occasionally and it sure is a slide show. Maybe 5 fps. While it's cool to see the screen split up 4-ways on the SNES like many a 3D N64 game, it's absolutely unplayable with the frame rate.
As for the review, good job, Chris Scullion. While I'm a huge fan of the SNES games (in particular, the first is one of my favorite games of all-time), I feel like that you've done a good job at covering this both for newcomers (although I'm surprised you didn't note the forced split-screen in TG1 in single player, which seems to annoy people) and people like myself that know these three games inside and out.
Didn't realize this was out this week, will probably pick them up.
@Serpenterror There are three different concepts here. You're right about refresh rate and FPS being different: an NTSC TV was always 60Hz, but a lot of games ran at 30, 20, or lower, especially once the PlayStation brought 3D gaming into the mainstream. (Essentially, they'd output the same frame to the TV two or three times in a row.)
But you touched on a third component: animation rate. 2D fighters like Street Fighter II almost always ran at 60fps. This meant that the camera and sprites could slide around at 60fps. However, just like with the many 60fps platformers (e.g., Super Mario Bros), the animations were drawn, stored, and played back at lower rates. Hand-drawn animation at 60fps just isn't feasible, so most games used maybe 5-15fps animations. (A few games use 24-30fps animations, and they look ridiculously smooth for what they are.)
If you watch a video of pretty much any 2D game in slow motion, you'll notice that the characters and camera are moving around on every frame, but the actual character animations only update (that is, the graphics actually change) after several frames.
Every time I see games like this, it reminds me of a great Game Boy game called Chase HQ.
Looking forward to this collection, as I'm a huge fan of the series, and own the originals. The Crossroads option could add some variation if the cars perform differently enough to the default ones. They were a wild bunch, notably the Cannibal (red car), which was super fast while very fuel thirsty so required more fuel stops. Whereas the Sidewinder (white car) was the complete opposite: fast acceleration, low top speed and very fuel efficient. The other two cars are somewhat in the middle and we rarely played them. It was either go hard or play safe.
Sadly, fuelling via pit stops was dropped for the sequels. They really spiced up races in 2-player mode as it meant several lead changes and exciting conclusions. I recall so often charging through late in the Cannibal to steal races from my friend in the Sidewinder. With the sequels, whichever player got the upgrades first (via collecting $$ on the course) dominated until both cars were fully upgraded. The first game had no upgrades.
As to a previous comment that the 4-player mode in Top Gear 3000 is unplayable, that's completely false. While it is a stripped back form of the main game with only 12 tracks available (if I recall correctly), it plays very well. It's a fun and novel diversion if you have the people around.
@HalBailman Interesting, thanks for your first hand comments on the playability of the 3 & 4 player modes in Top Gear 3000.
While obviously I wasn't impressed by the choppiness during the attract mode demonstrations of that mode when the game is left idle at the title screen, I also like I said had never actually gone past two player multiplayer with the game.
I suppose in hindsight it's probably not the wisest of ideas to judge it by the attract mode alone...
As for pit stops, I too missed that aspect in the sequels (and was disappointed to not see them make a return for Horizon Chase). While my strategies won't work in this collection (iirc, the Sidewinder has a higher fuel consumption rate in Japanese Top Racer form than in my US cartridge of Top Gear), it was always a blast to risk staying out to coast across the finish line on empty. Race 1 in Brazil and Race 2 in Italy are the prime candidates for that strategy.
It was also a stroke of genius on Gremlin's part to let you short fuel the car, allowing you to risk if you had put enough fuel in to make it to the end. While something that's a part of real life motorsports, it's not something that I can recall in any other arcade console racer.
Looks like my decision to skip this and get new star gp was a wise one.
Why is online mode regarded multiple times as unneeded? That's a huge selling point. I want to play this with my buddy from down the street like the old days, except he doesn't live down the street anymore and we both have kids so the online mode is perfect for us - assuming they have it working at launch.
@Coalescence I imagine that the reviewer is looking at it from the perspective of the probabilities of getting into a random match with a stranger.
From that standpoint it's unlikely to ever result in an active enough community where you can jump online with the reasonable expectation of getting in some online races.
I think the situation you bring up is why it's actually a worthwhile addition rather than one that's just going to gather dust.
@Atariboy Who knows. Perhaps some other "Attract Modes" are good reflections of the actual game, and that misled you. All I know is it played well. Here's a video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OSX31hrd5M
I forgot about those little gauges showing the relative position of each car! It was really done well for the era.
Oh yes, the short fuelling in the first Top Gear! It was the proverbial "splash and dash". That's probably why I liked the Cannibal so much - because it offered a far more enriching race experience. With TG2, once you started buying turbos and stuff, that could be used to increase fuel use and therefore instigate fuel stops. A shame they dumped refuelling. TG3000 had the element of insufficient recharge strips, and often you'd need to coast for much of the race. The cars maintained speed unless you crashed. That was a thrilling element.
The only other 4-player racing game I recall was the karting game, Street Racer. It was split horizontally! Considering all the courses were flat like Mario Kart, the short height of each window didn't matter. It was an outstanding game, and even had a soccer mode. Take that, Rocket League!
the MSU Version is a dream
@scully1888 bet you don’t.
This is 3000 yen in Japan btw. Wild.
@Faucet This is a raster game and not a 3D Game.
No hack can magically improve the frame rate in any way.
They would need to make new code for the game. They would need to make the game new from scratch to make it run at 60 FPS.
Almost any game made back then would be need to made from scratch for modern hardware.
You should look up information on "raster" to see how they work in reality and why it's impossible to boost them.
Top Gear 2 made IGN's Top 100 SNES Games of All Time list.
So knowing they play as they were it's an easy purchase from me.
@JohnnyC chase HQ was an arcade game originally.
I’ll just play this on Yuzu. Errrrrrr, wait…….
(Just kidding mods)
@norwichred Yep, as were many games from 30 or so years ago. Still be nice to play it again.
I fall in the camp that has no emotional ties... I just simply wanted to play them. Seems like you get what you get in this collection, which isn't all bad, and I think the review captured that accordingly. Plus I'm familiar with QUByte's output lately, So I know what to expect. I'll wait for a good sale or check for a GameFly release.
At 39.99 here the US I will stick to my SNES version of Top Gear..and play the original…as they say in the UK do they take me for some kind of mug…and are they having a laugh😳
@MontyCircus thank god for IGN's top 100 games list, eh, imagine if it didn't exist, who'd be able to tell great games from bad ones
I’d rather these be added to the NSO.
This seems like a tough one to review. Because on the one hand, the originals seem like they hold up. But on the other hand, all of the extra features and “new” games sounds pretty cruddy. Seems like this game as a collection would be a much lower score but it’s saved by the quality of the originals.
In the extras menu there is a "redeem code" function. Anyone know what it does?
My childhood friend and I got the game exclusively to play online and that fact that the only mode that we were interested in doesn't work is extremely disappointing. I wish I could return it.
Thanks for pointing out that the supposed fourth game is just a basic rom hack. They could have gotten away with calling it a bonus mode but calling it a whole new game is wild.
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