Rally-X

It's been a while since I've written one of these, because I ended up taking a pretty lengthy hiatus in the middle of my time spent with Namco's 1980 arcade maze game Rally-X. I need to address a hardware issue, and a software issue.

While playing the game, I found myself getting a lot of unintended additional inputs while trying to change directions, which I initially attributed to the overly-light lever weight on my HORI RAP4 Kai. My girlfriend and I spent some time attempting to source parts to replace the lever with a heavier one, but this proved untenable, so it offered to just lend me its old arcade stick, which had already received such a modification.

With the problem thus solved on the hardware side, I theoretically could have jumped back into the game right then, but I had been finding myself pretty fatigued around that time and was generally going through some pretty intense emotional difficulties, so I put it off for quite a while. This has been an intermittent problem, it popped up again in between playing more of the game and writing this piece, and will likely continue to rear its head.

Even when I did collect myself enough to play more of the game, the software problems continued, as I discovered that while the heavier lever weight did help, part of the issue was just that the game's movement is a little janky. In the earlier Pac-Man, running into a wall will stop you in your tracks until you input a new direction of movement, but no such rest is afforded to the Rally-X car, whose momentum must never stop. Upon contact with a wall, it will simply turn automatically 90° in a random direction, and when you're in tight quarters this can get real confusing real fast and give the impression that you're getting more inputs than you intend. Upon further examination, it became clear that Rally-X's movement, in contrast to the simple and clean locomotion of Pac-Man, is actually pretty janky and weird. You're driving a car, which you would expect to be more limited in how it can maneuver, but in fact you can double back on your own trajectory just like in any other maze game. Your movement will immediately snap to the new direction, but graphically your car will play out a pretty strangely long and weighty drifting animation to sell the U-turn in a way that doesn't quite work. As a result of this aesthetic flourish aimed at selling the implausible arcade movements as actual car behavior, you can, via judicious wiggling of the stick in particular parts of the map, manage to clip your way inside a wall and swerve around in there for a while, something which I never would have expected.

Thus far I've been focusing on some complaints about the handling model, but I would like to be clear that I think this game is actually pretty good overall. It unfortunately suffers from a lack of polish when compared with its predecessor, but it also expands on it in some interesting ways. The mazes are much larger and more complex than the one featured in Pac-Man, and both of these facts impact the game in fascinating ways. The increased size necessitates a scrolling screen, and to compensate for the inability to see every flag and pursuer at all times, you have a map to the right which shows the locations of your car, the flags, and the pursuers relative to the full play area, without showing any details about the road layout. This creates an interesting split perspective where you need to look at the main view to see where you can and can't go in your immediate area, but also keep an eye on the overall map view to get a sense of where you need to go in the long term, as well as where the threats are closing in from. When you combine this with the pressure of having a limited amount of fuel that runs down over the course of the stage, it's actually a pretty interesting pathfinding challenge, that presents more specific challenges than the general perfect-knowledge avoidance you spend Pac-Man doing. On top of that, it's got an interesting scoring system. Each subsequent flag you pick up on a single life offers incrementally more points than the previous, and one flag, marked with an S, doubles its current point payout. If you want to max out your score, you need to not only pick up all the flags, but do so in such a way as to leave the S-flag for last without losing any lives (which will reset the value progress, thus also resetting the accumulated worth of the S-flag). As a result there's also an interesting push and pull with risk management; do you think you can survive the whole stage on one life? If not, it might be worth grabbing the S-flag when its base value is, say, 600, so as to avoid losing it all and being left with a max base value of 300.

After a couple runs through each stage, you then get a bonus stage before it switches to the next one (charmingly announced with a screen proclaiming CHARANGING STAGE) which removes the pursuers. However, don't mistake this for a break from the challenge. To make up for the lack of external pressure forcing you off an optimal flag-collection path, the internal pressure is increased. You have less fuel to work with, and this was where I first encountered the nerve-wracking experience of coming close to running out. As that meter gets low, your car gradually slows down, eventually puttering to a stop. This is tense when you're closing in on that last flag and unsure if you'll make it; I can only imagine it's much more so when you have a pursuer on your tail, gaining ground as you run out of the ability to evade.

Rally-X certainly has its foibles, being arguably less elegantly designed than Pac-Man and definitely less polished, but I think it's been a little unfairly overshadowed in all honesty. It doesn't offer that same simplicity of vision, but the added complexity brings quite a bit to the table, and I think if it were a little less janky I might actually be willing to call it a better game overall. As it stands, it's certainly held back by some questionable aspects of its handling model, but great fun nonetheless.