Way back in 1994, when our very own Evoroth was just 6 years old, Nintendo released a game called ‘Unirally‘ (or Uniracers in the USA) for the SNES. Now my first interesting fact about this game is that it was developed by a company called ‘DMA Design’, if that name does not mean anything to you, then maybe their current name will, ‘Rockstar North‘. That’s right, this game was made by the same studios that bought us Grand Theft Auto. Interesting facts aside, Unirally was a fast paced racing game with unicycles that saw you race your unicycle against the computer (or a friend) in either a straight head-to-head race, or a stunt battle. This game boasted some of the slickest looking graphics that SNES produced, a fact that is not really done justice by the pictures, but get this hooked up to an LCD television at 60hz and you’ll see what I mean…

As far as the races go, they are pretty straight forward, one-on-one, first past the post affairs… There are fiendish sections of the track that will slow you down, speed you up, or even flip you round to the bottom of the track. You can gain speed by doing stunts whilst you unicycle is in the air, and by timing you jumps well, as a poor landing will scrub some speed off. The races are split into 2 categories, circuit & race. Circuits are tracks that loop back round and are contested over a number of laps, whereas a Race is a simple point-to-point over a much longer track. The stunt battles are a different story. These see you in a specially shaped level, like a half pipe for example, trying to score as many points as possible by performing stunts within a time limit. As you could imagine, there isn’t too many stunts a unicycle without a rider could perform, so what you have are pretty basic flips and spins, and the art is performing a massive chain of them without wiping out when you land.

The game really did not take itself very seriously though, like if you tried to enter ‘Sonic’, ‘Sega’ or any swear word (well, I’m sure saying those words were like swearing at Nintendo) as your name it came up with a message saying ‘Not cool enough’. Also anybody lucky enough to still have the instruction manual for this game can enjoy the light hearted read that it is, with such classic lines as:-

• “Race! Race race race race race! Thats how you play!”
• “Too easy. All you need to be able to do is to rotate the Unicycle laterally, transversely and…er… something”
• “Don’t lose”
• “It resonates in a similar manner to a radio tuner and can pick up the emitted ‘reality waves’”

So to sum it all up, the gameplay is great and still addictive to this day, despite being almost 15 years old. For some reason I just don’t seem to tire of little unicycles with funny faces racing each other?

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