echoed throughout the gaming industry: WHEN IN DOUBT, MAKE IT AN RPG. Don’t question

it. You can jam in some sort of numbers-based progression system. You can add cute mascot

characters. You can dance if you want to... I’m sorry. Shining Scorpion has the hallmarks

of an RPG: Large, emotive sprites, towns to walk around, crap to buy and sell. But you’re

not saving princesses or collecting monsters. No, this game’s about slot-car racing. Honestly.

I cannot make this up.

Now, slot-car racing could be a really brainless game. You go forward. You can either have

your finger on the “MOVE” trigger or not. That’s pretty much the size of it. After

that, the excitement is in seeing cars fly off the track and hit your kid brother in

the head, which is awesome until the crying starts and then you have to defuse that situation

before mom finds out. In Shining Scorpion, though, this crap is taken UPMARKET. There’s

a whole league of Mini-4-Wheel-Drive vehicles - because the first thing you do to take yourself

upmarket is come up with a new name for the sport that no one recognizes - and each machine

is fine-tuned for performance. You can install new batteries, new motors, new wheels, and

new bumpers, each with a different weight, output, radius in some cases, coefficient

of friction... This is some hardcore number crunching. And that’s really the game’s

saving grace, as the control after you actually get into a race is just “on” or “off.”

By and large, the results of the race are determined before the engines are turned on:

You either have a statistical advantage or you don’t.

But that’d be missing the real purpose of the game: to generate interest in Tamaya’s

existing line of Mini4WD cars, which they’ve been making since 1982. That’s right, not

only is this a weird, eclectic video game, it’s based on an actual, weird, eclectic

hobby! A quick internet search indicates that, yes, people still do race these things. They’ve

outlasted the Super Famicom, that much is for certain. So it’s not very interactive,

there’s not much action, and it’s largely a marketing ploy. But it invites experimentation

and design, and if you really like it, there are apparently other people in the community,

driving little motorized things and hoping that their stabilizers hold up. So while it

might not be the best racing game of the 16-bit era, it may just be the best racer-designing

game. Which is a whole ‘nother kettle of transmission fluid entirely.