Banishing Racer

One distinguishing factor of vehicle games that tends to get lost in genres tied to humanoid avatars is that turning around can be rather difficult. When you’re driving a car, you have the option of either doing a 180° turn, subject to all of the dynamics that a tight turn involves at speed, or stopping to shift into reverse. Banishing Racer applies a rudimentary version of this on the 2D plane, where the main car refuses to ignore inertia and going backwards requires overcoming the forward force. It’s not realistic by any means – the other main movement mechanic is a forward dash that can also be done after jumping – but it helps differentiate the game from peers that had moved away from this handling model by the early ’90s.

The game pretty quickly lets you know just how strict it is with backwards movement in the first level, where an inexplicable one-off bombing raid occurs that demolishes bridges as you drive. Failing to start braking and stop on one of the struts will instantly kill your car, either from a drop into the void or contact with an explosive. In fact, contact with anything is instant death, and the memorization-heavy level design will remind you of this incessantly by putting cannons just off-screen, flanking you with insta-spawn enemies, or trapping you in a lethal dead-end where your only recourse is trudging backwards. Engaging with these in your car’s impulse-heavy handling becomes more interesting when it involves to baiting enemies that jump or change direction when in your range. You bounce off of obstacles, enemy or otherwise, which helps set up certain escape routes while also complicating areas with ceiling hazards. Still, when the game falls back on more static or cyclical gimmicks, it can be hard to ignore how punishing its memorization focus is. Even the final boss, which requires chaining jumps between projectiles to reach the boss’s head, struggles to offer a respite after an extremely tight auto-scroller stage prior. Softening the blow with generous extends can only do so much.

In this state, turtles come out and attempt to slap you with nunchucks from out of nowhere. They eventually spawn enough behind you that you can’t attempt to replant your feet at all. Eventually, one of these trains restricts your space to the top of the screen, making bounces off of enemies somewhat harder [src]

If you’re coming in for cute line art, you’ll get what you want right out of the gate in the attract reel, but be warned that the game itself leaves something to be desired. The main car benefits from eyebrows and a fair amount of pupil movement to accentuate the strain of stopping and to waggle upon jumping, but his opponents have glassy, dead eyes that don’t look quite as appealing. The non-car enemies benefit from their strangeness, such as slot machines and turtles with nunchucks, but they’re accents against dry backgrounds that vary between empty and repetitive. The art lacks consistency as well: pit the mottled depth of the oscillating water backgrounds in 4-2 against the sharp-cornered, flat platforms in 4-3. The end, where the car flies off behind the Statue of Liberty after defeating a tank-cum-hawk¹ transformer-esque machine, might be best watched on YouTube for those less interested in unearthing the few interesting parts about the gameplay.