The Top Gear series, but especially this first title, was and is incredibly popular in South America. I found out about this pretty quickly when researching the game. What this game's unique selling propositions are would be three-fold.
First, Top Gear has a fast pace. Not F-Zero fast, but pretty fast. Especially if you're going up and down hills, it can get pretty hectic. Second, it comes with dozens of courses spanning the whole world, from Germany to Brazil, from LA to Tokyo. Is there enough variety to support these 32 total courses? Not quite. Most actually feel very similar, and are distinguished by pretty small additions (obstacles on the course) and length.
The third and final USP is pretty cool. The game adds strategy to races. There is your typical nitro system that is limited to 3 uses per race. There is the selection of one of four cars, which differ in speed, handling and fuel consumption. Finally, fuel consumption itself is a big deal, as you have limited fuel that will get depleted before you finish the race on certain courses that are up to 7 laps long I believe. This means you need to use pit stops and time your visits well, as you will lose ground while you're waiting for your fuel to charge.
Overall, I appreciated these elements. Adding this feature does mean however that some tracks can take up to 6 minutes though. That's something you might feel one way or the other about in arcade racers, but I enjoyed the shorter levels more, even without pit stops becoming a factor.
One negative I want to mention is that half of the screen is constantly blocked by a split-screen setup that shows a computer racing below you. This is no issue in 2-Player of course, but could have been removed for single player.
In terms of content, the game offers you the four aforementioned cars, the 32 maps and puts these two things together for one single mode, which is a campaign through all maps in the game. You start in the USA and have to finish in a certain spot on the ranking to qualify for the next set of maps. I finished 2nd once and still qualified, so up to half of the game, there was no need to finish 1st yet. Finishing 4th didn't do the job though.
Finally, the soundtrack is worth a mention. There are some great tracks here, but out of the 4 used for the 32 tracks, I felt indifferent about two, so I felt there wasn't enough variety here and it wasn't an F-Zero situation where I was bopping my head to pretty much all tracks and even listened to some of them outside of the game from time to time. In general, the soundtrack is seen as one of the highlights of this game, so your enjoyment of it may differ. I just found 4 tracks to be too few either way.
Overall, Top Gear is a fun racing game. It doesn't surpass F-Zero as my favorite racing game for the SNES (so far), but it is similarly addictive and I have no hard time figuring out why it's still popular at some parts of the Earth.
(I played this as part of my challenge to go through notable video games in chronological order starting in 1990.)
First, Top Gear has a fast pace. Not F-Zero fast, but pretty fast. Especially if you're going up and down hills, it can get pretty hectic. Second, it comes with dozens of courses spanning the whole world, from Germany to Brazil, from LA to Tokyo. Is there enough variety to support these 32 total courses? Not quite. Most actually feel very similar, and are distinguished by pretty small additions (obstacles on the course) and length.
The third and final USP is pretty cool. The game adds strategy to races. There is your typical nitro system that is limited to 3 uses per race. There is the selection of one of four cars, which differ in speed, handling and fuel consumption. Finally, fuel consumption itself is a big deal, as you have limited fuel that will get depleted before you finish the race on certain courses that are up to 7 laps long I believe. This means you need to use pit stops and time your visits well, as you will lose ground while you're waiting for your fuel to charge.
Overall, I appreciated these elements. Adding this feature does mean however that some tracks can take up to 6 minutes though. That's something you might feel one way or the other about in arcade racers, but I enjoyed the shorter levels more, even without pit stops becoming a factor.
One negative I want to mention is that half of the screen is constantly blocked by a split-screen setup that shows a computer racing below you. This is no issue in 2-Player of course, but could have been removed for single player.
In terms of content, the game offers you the four aforementioned cars, the 32 maps and puts these two things together for one single mode, which is a campaign through all maps in the game. You start in the USA and have to finish in a certain spot on the ranking to qualify for the next set of maps. I finished 2nd once and still qualified, so up to half of the game, there was no need to finish 1st yet. Finishing 4th didn't do the job though.
Finally, the soundtrack is worth a mention. There are some great tracks here, but out of the 4 used for the 32 tracks, I felt indifferent about two, so I felt there wasn't enough variety here and it wasn't an F-Zero situation where I was bopping my head to pretty much all tracks and even listened to some of them outside of the game from time to time. In general, the soundtrack is seen as one of the highlights of this game, so your enjoyment of it may differ. I just found 4 tracks to be too few either way.
Overall, Top Gear is a fun racing game. It doesn't surpass F-Zero as my favorite racing game for the SNES (so far), but it is similarly addictive and I have no hard time figuring out why it's still popular at some parts of the Earth.
(I played this as part of my challenge to go through notable video games in chronological order starting in 1990.)