Road Runner's Death Valley Rally (SNES) Playthrough

A playthrough of Sunsoft's 1992 license-based action game for the Super Nintendo, Road Runner's Death Valley Rally.

From the MacVentures to Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective to Beavis & Butthead: Virtual Stupidity, ICOM was responsible for several celebrated adventure games in their time. They were also responsible for some truly terrible action games, including the likes of Ghost Manor and Yo Bro!

Road Runner's Death Valley Rally isn't the worst game they made. I'll give it that much credit.

Following the Sonic mascot-platformer blueprint, the game puts you in control of the Road Runner as he streaks across fifteen stages in an attempt to escape being murdered by Wile E. Coyote.

If nothing else, Death Valley Rally certainly looks the part. Reviewers raved over the quality of the graphics, often saying that it looked just like the cartoon upon which it was based, and they were totally right. Even thirty years later, it still looks fantastic. The characters are dead ringers for their TV counterparts, and the animation is just as convincing.

Just like in the cartoon, Wile E. has a huge variety of ACME-branded implements of destruction that he wields as inexpertly as ever. He gets a brand new gadget for every stage, and a lot of the game's fun comes from seeing what he'll use next...providing you can ever make it past the first few levels.

The problem with Death Valley Rally is that the gameplay didn't see a fraction of the effort that the developers invested in nailing the look and feel of the show.

The controls are a nightmare: Road Runner skids on every surface as if it was ice, and his jump is floaty and imprecise so you'll constantly have to correct jumps in midair to avoid overshooting platforms. The collision detection feels off, too - Road Runner's collision box is narrower than his sprite, so you'll miss jumps that look like you should've been able to make just fine, over and over again.

The stages are built so that'll you'll need a lot speed to clear certain obstacles - just like Sonic - but the game is fond of throwing obstacles and pitfalls in your path without fair warning, and Wile E. Coyote regularly flies through the screen to attack without any sort of heads up. The inordinate number of blind jumps and unavoidable hits you end up taking puts a huge damper on the overall experience.

Nintendo Power's coverage of this one was telling. NP usually avoided overt criticism of the games they covered, but Death Valley Rally's feature goes out of its way to tell you how sloppy the controls are, and it does so on more than one occasion.

Road Runner's Death Valley Rally is an unfortunate example of what happens when style is prioritized over substance. It looks fantastic, but once you hit start, that controller suddenly becomes a stick of Acme dynamite in your hands.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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