Watch your step, for you’ve just entered theGraveyard. Inside, we’ll be digging up games that have long been without a pulse. You’ll see both good and bad souls unearthed every month as we search through the more… forgotten…parts of history.
The ’90s were a golden age for racing games on consoles and in arcades and one of the era’s most-defining games for both was Daytona USA. It built upon the foundation forged in Virtua Racing and expanded upon it. While the game did get sequels and off-shoots, there weren’t any other games quite like it on the market for owners of other consoles, except for Burning Road and its sequel Explosive Racing. The first game was one I enjoyed in demo form back in the day and it very much felt like a more chaotic Daytona USA, but for the PlayStation instead of Saturn.
The overall look of the menus and in-game UI were similar, and it led to the game being considered a rip-off and nothing more. With the benefit of hindsight and decades of minimal arcade racers on the market, though, Burning Road occupies an interesting place in history and is one that remains playable to this day on modern hardware as well. Much like Daytona USA, players have three tracks to enjoy, but unlike Daytona, there’s a greater variety of vehicle taps (although sadly no hidden horse to race with) and a surprisingly high amount of different track pieces to work with.
One minute, you can be racing in a tunnel and the next, you’re in a snow storm. It’s a shame the game wasn’t made in an era with track creation tools nor has it had any real ROM hacking done to it for that because there are a lot of cool track components that are cool and used for a small amount of overall space. The developers had a lot of nice ideas that they were able to implement, but it is a minor shame that they weren’t able to get more tracks into the core game.
A Hidden Racing Gem
Thankfully, what’s here is a lot of fun and there’s so much variety in them that they’re a blast to replay even in rapid succession. Having so much variety in a single track, let alone three, makes it a challenge to master each track or at least minimize mistakes – especially when it comes to oversteering on turns. Each of the in-game vehicles offers some kind of gameplay-related difference and in a welcome change from Daytona and an actual major improvement, everything isn’t just a change in color scheme. You have several different kinds of vehicle types to use and each plays differently and has its own learning curve.
Some are better for wider spaces where you can drift a lot, while others hug the road more. Each available vehicle can tackle every course to a fair degree, but they’ll each handle certain parts better than others – making every vehicle feel rewarding in their own way to learn and master. Back when I first played this on a demo disc, the only vehicle usable was the blue and white car and having the full game’s three vehicles opens up the gates to an added challenge when the vehicle doesn’t fit the environment you’re in perfectly while also forcing you to get better quickly because there’s no rewind functionality here. The blue car is a good all-arounder with a high top speed and decent handling, while the red car is looser on the track but goes faster. The monster trucks do a great job of hugging the road at the expense of being slower on the track.
Carnage on the Track
Visually, Burning Road looks rock-solid and it’s aided by the PS1-era graphics being retro and the developers at Funsoft nailing the look of Daytona USA, but doing so on hardware that could offer up better framerates than the Saturn versions of Daytona. At the time, the game was viewed as a knock-off of Daytona, which is a fair assessment, but it does a lot differently in terms of track type and variety while also mixing up the vehicle variety and offering consistent frame rates across the board. It’s very much a great supplemental experience for Daytona USA die-hards and is a welcome addition to a library in an era with few new arcade-style racers on the market – let alone any that control as smoothly as Burning Road.
Burning Road has a solid sound mix overall. While the soundtrack isn’t as memorable as Daytona, it does go for a silly vocal soundtrack with a rock influence and heavy metal. It’s a good blend of genres to keep the blood bumping and amps you up when you’ve got cars surrounding you and snow falling and you just hear this high-energy music making you want to keep forging ahead and dominate the competition. The sound effects for smashing into the environment and other cars are solid too.
Rediscovering a Hidden Gem
Unlike a lot of PS1 games, Burning Road is playable on modern hardware with a great deal of ease. While it was a PS1 exclusive in its heyday and never got a re-release beyond that, it has since been re-released for the Xbox Series consoles (with Xbox One playable but not recommended) alongside its sequel for under $10. Now if you’re someone like me who has the Daytona USA 360 release alongside Like a Dragon Gaiden with Daytona 2 on there as Sega Racing Classic 2 and Ridge Racer 6, then you may basically turn an Xbox Series console into a dream machine for arcade racers.
Graveyard: Fire Pro Wrestling Returns
Fire Pro Wrestling Returns remains an all-time classic in both the series and genre.
