Growing up I was a pretty big fan of the Looney Tunes shorts, I played a ton of games starring the characters as I went from Genesis to the PS1. Death Valley Rally was the first game I played which starred my favorites, the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. Unfortunately it wasn't a great first outing, and the first step was more like a slip and a crash into a bottomless pit as is tradition for this game in particular.
Visually I think the game actually looks pretty good. The backgrounds represent the cartoons well enough and Road Runner and Coyote are drawn fairly nicely. There's actually a pretty good application of scaling/Mode 7 with the Coyote classically falling down the chasm. Every stage also ends with the Coyote's contraptions being ended by extreme misfortune or his own sheer stupidity, so the devs at least know what their source material is about.
It's a shame they forgot what game they were making, because the first stage would lead you to believe that this is going to be a Sonic the Hedgehog ripoff game. But not terribly long afterwards the stages turn into these jumbled messes of platforms and confusing labyrinths. Road Runner jumps like gravity forgot about him, and this combined with the precision the game sometimes demands out of you just gets absolutely annoying. You also have to do all this puzzling navigation while at times the Coyote will just come out of fucking nowhere to land a cheap shot on you. This can be observed as early as the third stage when he dons the green bat suit from one of the classic Chuck Jones shorts that I'm not gonna remember the title for. You can take about 7 hits until you die, which sounds very lenient until you play this yourself and realize how horrifically easy it is to get hit. All of this leads to a fairly difficult game that kids are apparently supposed to be able to play.
Audio-wise the game sounds like it's completely on crack, there's these numbers you can pick up which increases your score and this "BWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAH" kind of sound just blares from your speakers at varying pitches. The music at times sounds like a chimpanzee just mindlessly slapped the keyboard, it's been close to 30 years and these notes still just do nothing but baffle me. What the hell is even going on there?
This isn't a horrible game, but it could've been a lot better. I'm disappointed in you ICOM Simulations, go back to Shadowgate games and having my torch go out so I can break my neck on a rock after losing 100 IQ points.
Visually I think the game actually looks pretty good. The backgrounds represent the cartoons well enough and Road Runner and Coyote are drawn fairly nicely. There's actually a pretty good application of scaling/Mode 7 with the Coyote classically falling down the chasm. Every stage also ends with the Coyote's contraptions being ended by extreme misfortune or his own sheer stupidity, so the devs at least know what their source material is about.
It's a shame they forgot what game they were making, because the first stage would lead you to believe that this is going to be a Sonic the Hedgehog ripoff game. But not terribly long afterwards the stages turn into these jumbled messes of platforms and confusing labyrinths. Road Runner jumps like gravity forgot about him, and this combined with the precision the game sometimes demands out of you just gets absolutely annoying. You also have to do all this puzzling navigation while at times the Coyote will just come out of fucking nowhere to land a cheap shot on you. This can be observed as early as the third stage when he dons the green bat suit from one of the classic Chuck Jones shorts that I'm not gonna remember the title for. You can take about 7 hits until you die, which sounds very lenient until you play this yourself and realize how horrifically easy it is to get hit. All of this leads to a fairly difficult game that kids are apparently supposed to be able to play.
Audio-wise the game sounds like it's completely on crack, there's these numbers you can pick up which increases your score and this "BWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAH" kind of sound just blares from your speakers at varying pitches. The music at times sounds like a chimpanzee just mindlessly slapped the keyboard, it's been close to 30 years and these notes still just do nothing but baffle me. What the hell is even going on there?
This isn't a horrible game, but it could've been a lot better. I'm disappointed in you ICOM Simulations, go back to Shadowgate games and having my torch go out so I can break my neck on a rock after losing 100 IQ points.