 S- that's drunk! The development team Titus has turned into a bit of a running joke over the years. Most of their efforts on the Super Nintendo were pretty forgettable, games like Blues Brothers and Incentation. They also made that god-awful Robocop first-person shooter game for PS2 and Xbox, and they're probably most famously known for Superman on N64. You know, the game where you fly thru rings for like the first 30 minutes of the game. On the bright side, that game is responsible for what is probably my favorite angry Every video game nerd episode ever, but on the downside, the game is, you know, overwhelmingly terrible. But hey, guess what? Titus made a racing game back in 1993 that was not only halfway decent, but also pretty dang ambitious in more ways than one. It's Lamborghini American Challenge, and yeah, on the surface this looks pretty generic, and it doesn't help that there are like four dozen racing games on the Super Nintendo alone, but this game has some things going for it that help make it stand out. Let's get the basic stuff out of the way first. First there's a versus mode against a second player, and there's single player championship mode. You have three racers to choose from, Sly, Pam, and Joe, although it doesn't really matter who you pick, I guess it just depends on whose picture you want on your screen most of the game. The map here tells you which races you can pick, with the yellow stars indicating the races you have enough money for to enter. Red stars are races you gotta win money to unlock. It's B to accelerate, A to use a boost, left and right to steer, and the L and R buttons to shift. If you use manual transmission, and you have a damage meter you have to manage, and that's about it. The racing itself is pretty bland, I admit. The hit detection when you approach other cars on the road is a bit dodgy, and the steering starts out incredibly loose and drifty. The good news is, the more races you finish in the top three, which is definitely not that hard, you get a bunch of money you can use to upgrade your car, everything from better tires to use in rain or snow, to more speed boosts to a better transmission. And of course you gotta spend money to repair your car as well, when your damage meter goes up. But placing in races isn't the only way you earn money, you can also bet on yourself to win, with two other characters referred to as your rivals. You get these great portraits of these painfully 90s caricatures, like Scott the Ninja, or this Road Warriors reject. Is that the brute man in the upper right? His face is certainly big enough. And check out the guy underneath him, looks like he spray painted his beard like Hollywood Hogan. If you can't already tell I really enjoy stuff like this, and there's like 19 other characters you can race against, which is great. One other aspect that comes into play here is the police, no not that police, they can harass the hell out of you, and are a general nuisance. You don't get pulled over, kicked out of the race or anything, but they get in your way and stay in your way, and slow you down. You can also catch a hefty fine at the end of the race if you smash into them too often, but what's cool though, is that there's stuff in the shop that you can buy, like radar, so you can see where cops are, or a radio jammer, which prevents them from ganging up on you, so that's a nice touch. What ultimately sold me on this game though, is that it's compatible with not one, but two Super Nintendo peripherals, the mouse and the superscope. The mouse is pretty self-explanatory, you just move the mouse left or right to steer and hold the right mouse button to accelerate. Yeah, it takes a bit of getting used to, but I actually grew to prefer it over using the D-pad, the loose controls actually make a little more sense when using this. But what about the superscope, how the heck does that work? All you gotta do is start the game with the scope plugged in the first controller port, and you'll get a prompt to shoot the screen and set the accuracy, then you just drive around and shoot cars till they go boom, with the goal being to destroy your rivals before crossing the finish line. The steering is automatic here, if you play it with just by yourself, but you can only accelerate by pressing the fire button on the scope, so you're just firing non-stop at everything that moves. Sometimes you end up passing your rivals, so you gotta sit there awkwardly, like an idiot, and wait for them to catch up to you so you can shoot at them again. Yeah, it's pretty jank, it's far from perfect, but it's still pretty fun. What makes this even better is that if you have a second player, they can control the car from the second controller port while the first player shoots at stuff. Now that is cool. Or you can just do like I did and steer the car with your feet as you shoot at the screen. Now this game is essentially the fourth game in a series, Crazy Cars. Those games were made for home computers like Amiga, Atari ST, and Commodore 64, and this game is pretty much a retooled edition of Crazy Cars 3. And as such, you can find Lamborghini American Challenge on DOS, as well as the Amiga CD32. There's a Game Boy version too, and it's actually kind of impressive for what it is, but when you play this one, this is what you're listening to the entire time. Yeah, no thanks, I will pass on that. So yeah, believe it or not, Lamborghini American Challenge, developed by Titus, is actually a pretty cool novelty game. Yeah, the actual racing is pretty pedestrian, but the bedding system is cool, racing the police is always fun. It not only doesn't work with the SNES mouse, but it works with the superscope as well. And you can play that game mode with two players. And hey, if you're going to own these old SNES accessories, you might as well have an excuse to use them, right? Well, this game is just that, a good excuse to bust out the mouse and the superscope. As a racing game, this game isn't going to sniff the likes of F-Zero or Top Gear, obviously, but as a novelty, this game works, and it's a fun curiosity. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.