How to play
Road Racer
Steer through the traffic, dodge the cones, and drive further than everyone else in forty seconds.
At a glance
- Players
- 1–4 at once
- Ages
- 6 and up
- Round
- About thirty seconds
- In the packs
- Party, Arena, Big Kids
Controls
The stick and button 1 are enough to play. The rest add moves for the older kids.
| What you press | What it does |
|---|---|
| Stick | steer left and right |
| Button 1 — the big button | boost |
| Button 2 | fire a missile |
| Button 3 | drop a banana peel |
How a round goes
Forty seconds on one shared road. Everyone starts together, and your place on screen is how far ahead of the pack you are. Traffic, cones, potholes and roadworks come at you, and lane closures alternate sides as the race goes on. There is always a gap you can thread.
Hit anything and you spin out for most of a second and slide back down the screen. One crash never puts you out; two back to back nearly do; a third drops you off the bottom, and off the bottom is out. A car that is trailing claws a little back on its own.
Treats appear on the road: boosts most often, missiles and bananas as the rarer prize. Boost is a burst of nearly double speed, and you can carry three. A missile flies up the road and spins out the first car it meets, rival or traffic; cones pass harmlessly underneath. A banana lands behind you, between you and everyone chasing, and your own peel never bites you.
Scoring and winning
Your score is metres driven. At the flag anyone still on the road beats anyone who dropped off the bottom; then the furthest wins. Ties share. Alone, your distance goes to the leaderboard — unless you were wrecked out.
Tips
- Boost, missile and banana fire on the press, so holding a button does nothing.
- You can still scoop up treats while you are spinning.
- The engine note is the race: it screams while anyone is on the nitro and bogs down when everybody is sideways.