{"id":20176,"date":"2020-06-08T00:01:47","date_gmt":"2020-06-08T00:01:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/?p=20176"},"modified":"2020-05-19T13:28:34","modified_gmt":"2020-05-19T13:28:34","slug":"80s-overdrive-switch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/2020\/06\/08\/80s-overdrive-switch\/","title":{"rendered":"80’s Overdrive (Switch)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Father\u2019s Day is coming up, and sometimes around now I think about the video games my dad likes to play.\u00a0 While he currently mostly plays casual games on his iPad, back when I was a kid, he played a lot of racing games in the arcade.\u00a0 I remember sitting in his lap in the sit-down racing arcade cabinets to play hits like Pole Position and Turbo.\u00a0 Years later when I was too big to sit in his lap, he still played arcade racers like OutRun and Ridge Racer.\u00a0 And one of the few games I could get him to play on the NES was Rad Racer!\u00a0 So when I saw 80\u2019s Overdrive on the Switch, it made me think of him.\u00a0 80\u2019s Overdrive is a retro inspired pixel racer that plays similarly to OutRun.<\/p>\n

There are three main modes in the game.\u00a0 The first is Career Mode.\u00a0 Here you start out with some money to buy a car. Then you race on tracks to earn more cash so you can upgrade your car or buy new ones.\u00a0 You\u2019ll earn more money the higher you place, and you can spend your money to buy upgrades like a better engine for top speed, steering for better handling, and bumpers to take less damage and slow down less when you get hit.\u00a0 You can also buy things for each car like nitro boosts and a police radar.\u00a0 But you\u2019ll want to keep a wad of cash always on hand because you also have to spend money on repairs if you get hit, and gas so you have enough fuel to race.<\/p>\n

Tracks are just point A to point B affairs, no laps or anything.\u00a0 Sometimes you can earn extra money on a track if someone requests that you collect certain items on the road while racing.\u00a0 These items you collect are 80\u2019s icons like VHS tapes and such.\u00a0 On some tracks the police will chase you and pull out in front of you and cut you off so you must avoid them or be faster than them.\u00a0 If you bump into cars or obstacles on the side of the road, you\u2019ll take damage.\u00a0 If you take too much damage, your car will stop and you won\u2019t be able to complete the race.\u00a0 You do NOT want that to happen because it takes a lot of money to repair your car when that occurs, and if you run out of money you\u2019ll have to start at the first races to build yourself back up.\u00a0 If you have no money whatsoever, you can earn 50 bucks a pop by washing cars in a minigame.\u00a0 You can even use the touch screen on the Switch to play it if it\u2019s in handheld mode.\u00a0 But yeah this part of the game really bogs down Career Mode, and it doesn\u2019t help that things start slowly with basic tracks and slow cars initially.<\/p>\n

The next mode is Time Attack, but I think they should\u2019ve called it Arcade Mode instead because it plays most like OutRun.\u00a0 Here you have a timer to get to a checkpoint, and when you do you can choose a different path to race on where the scenery changes.\u00a0 And you do this until you run out of time.\u00a0 One neat thing is that if you drive very close to traffic, you can add a second or two to your timer.\u00a0 But the bad thing is that you use the same cars that you have in Career Mode, so if you haven\u2019t upgraded them very much, you won\u2019t get too far here either.<\/p>\n

The last mode is kind of neat.\u00a0 You can create your own tracks in Edit Mode!\u00a0 Now, you can\u2019t fully design a track, but you can choose how many lanes and how long the race will be, as well as frequency of turns, hills, and traffic.\u00a0 Then you can save your edits and trade with others via codes.\u00a0 So yeah, kind of a neat addition that I haven\u2019t seen in a game like this before.<\/p>\n

Even though this game uses pixels and sprite scaling, the framerate is very smooth and the scaling isn\u2019t choppy or blocky at all.\u00a0 Play control is also solid and responsive and plays like how you\u2019d expect, maybe better.\u00a0 Like OutRun, before a race you can pick a song to play in the background via the radio on your dashboard, but you can also change the music on the fly during a race as well.\u00a0 There are dozens of songs to choose from, and while many sound like generic elevator style music, they all have an 80\u2019s vibe to them so I liked them anyway.\u00a0 80\u2019s music is one of my guilty pleasures.\u00a0 Aside from the problems and speedbumps I had in Career Mode, the only other thing this game could\u2019ve used is a split screen multiplayer mode or something.\u00a0 But other than that, this is one of those games that is more fun than what it should be.\u00a0 I really enjoyed it anyway, but then, I was a child of the 80\u2019s so it could be some nostalgia talking.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Kid Factor:<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you bump into cars or obstacles, your car will stop, move from side to side, or have smoke or parts fall out, but that\u2019s about as violent as it gets.\u00a0 Reading skill is helpful for some of the menu text.\u00a0 80\u2019s Overdrive is rated E for Everyone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Father\u2019s Day is coming up, and sometimes around now I think about the video games my dad likes to play.\u00a0 While he currently mostly plays casual games on his iPad, back when I was a kid, he played a lot of racing games in the arcade.\u00a0 I remember sitting in his lap in the sit-down […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":20171,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-game-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20176"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20178,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20176\/revisions\/20178"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}