Runabout 3: Neo Age
September 26th, 2023
Out of sheer boredom and a desire to spend every waking moment of my life talking about video games, I used this randomizer to pick a random retro game to write a blog post about. This is what happened next...
Quick sidenote before we begin: originally, I was going to write about a different game: Akira for the NES. If that name sounds familiar, that's because it's a point-and-click adventure game based on the movie of the same name
Screenshots taken from this page on romhacking.net
Unfortunately the game only came out in Japan, and there's only one completed fan translation for it which I couldn't get to work, but I had never heard of this game before, and I thought it was interesting enough to mention
The 3-minute long opening cutscene of Runabout 3 that plays before you even get to the title screen paints a picture of a game that I think would've been better than the actual Runabout 3
The Runabout 3 in the opening is a fast, frantic, action-packed driving game where your goal is to blaze through New York while causing as much chaos as possible. It's like Crazy Taxi, but minus the Taxi and with all the Crazy. There are cars flying, flipping, and blowing up all over the place, and you can even drive a fucking tank. It is just about the coolest fucking thing I've ever seen on the PS2
Just a regular day in New York
The actual Runabout 3 is a game that plops you down onto the streets of the Big Apple and asks that you collect the 5 scrunklies and take them to Scrimblo Park before the timer runs out. Better not cause too much destruction— that'll slow you down, and you won't have enough time left to reach the goal and finish the mission! Oh, but did you cause enough destruction to get a high score? You did? Sorry, this mission says that you fail if you crash into even a single thing!
Yes, I do wish to decide the name
What do you want from me, Runabout 3? I want to like you, but it feels like you don't even know what you are. You want me to crash into stuff and launch my car off of ramps for points, but you also want me to speed towards the goal area without wasting time? It feels like Runabout 3 is confused about what kind of experience it's trying to offer the player. I thought I had just discovered a hidden gem, only to dig deeper and unearth just... a very bland and frustrating driving game. It's not even truly bad, just not fun. I didn't even bother to play past the first 3 missions, because one of them is a stealth mission where you have to stalk someone throughout the city (the only context the game gives you is that it's someone's wife, which is... really creepy), and I swear for half the mission you just have to sit there and wait for her to move before you can proceed, because if you get too close... instant game over. Start the mission all over again idiot
Can you let that sink in for a moment? Waiting. In a game about cars. The same game that was in that intense opening cutscene you watched a few paragraphs ago (You did watch it, right?)
Oh yeah, I tried driving the tank once. It sucks
The one thing I can and will defend about Runabout 3 is the soundtrack. The very sparse Wikipedia page for the Runabout series mentions that the music was provided by a Japanese surf band called Surf Coasters, and their work is by far the best thing about this game
This song plays at the end of a mission, during the name entry screen. It is a *vibe*
I came away from my 1 hour experience with this game feeling like I just didn't wanna play it anymore, and that's a bit sad. Aside from the surprisingly great soundtrack, everything else about Runabout 3 I can only describe as mid
