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NES box art for Rally Bike, the cover of NEStalgia episode 371

371 · Rally Bike

▶ Game info
VerdictSkip it
GenreSports
SeasonSeason 6
DeveloperToaplan
PublisherRomstar
April 4, 2025 · 33 min · transcript available

There's a cross-country motorcycle rally going from San Francisco to New York. In Rally Bike, the player has but one goal, to work their way up through the ranks of the racers and place high enough to qualify for the next race.

Our verdict: Skip it

Rally Bike is a top-down motorcycle racer, and Mike, Sean and Joe ran out of things to say about it before the episode was half over. We drifted to Ridge Racer, Gran Turismo 7, an arcade Mario Kart cabinet in Austin and rock, paper, scissors, and then admitted it. Mike's closing line: a game that offers this little leaves you only the features to explain.

What doesn't work

  • A race with no race in it. There are about 50 racers and you start behind them all, needing something like 25th place to advance in the early stages. Nobody is really ahead of you. The game just feeds in new riders to pass, so there is no tension.
  • Gas stops are bookkeeping. The manual says five racers have to pass you before a fill-up finishes. We didn't think that was a real racing decision, since the game doesn't track where anyone is once they leave the screen. It's an exact five-place penalty and nothing more.
  • It's dodging, not racing. Boulders, trains, cars and oil slicks come at you, and the opponents only slide over a sprite's width to block you. It has more in common with Flappy Bird than Forza. Steering is touchy, which made the avoiding the hard part.
  • Slow. It's very slow for a racer, and the tune-up shop barely matters: two-cycle or four-cycle engine, and tires.
  • No plot, no star. We pitched "Freddy Spencer's Rally Bike", with a mugshot between races like the Magic Johnson basketball game.

What's there

  • Fuel is the one decision. Hold full throttle, and pick which of the three or four gas drops to take, because missing them all is the worst thing that can happen. We ran short once when a giant truck chased us and we didn't have the gas for full acceleration. That truck was the best obstacle, because you have to get in front of it rather than just avoid it.
  • A little variety. The ground textures change from stage to stage, and the docks level asks for jumps over the pit.

Beyond the game

The manual is five pages of real content, one of them a picture. The back of the box calls the rider "exactly 27" and ends with a line telling you not to drink and drive. One course goes from a New York avenue to a parking lot with racers still going through it, which we decided was dreamlike. We did not agree on what makes a good racer, but we all like Mock Rider, and we noted that arcade racers don't really take off until the 64-bit era.

The bottom line

Skip it. All three of us voted it off the Essential Games List. Sean called it a 100% skip, saying it barely feels like a racer and has none of the tension. Joe's opinion kept sinking the more he learned about the artificial racers and the five-place gas penalty. Mike's advice: next time you see Mario Kart Arcade GP2, smile for the photo. Joe wanted to be able to shoot the other bikes, and that small thing would have raised his interest a bit.

Written from our conversation in this episode.

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