85. Motocross Champion (Human, Famicom, 1989)

Motocross Champion is, as its name implies, a motocross racing game. In this 1-player game, you race against 5 other bikes on 8 different courses. Looking at the game, it is tempting to draw comparisons to Nintendo's Excitebike, but other than the fact that they are both Famicom motocross games, the two titles play pretty differently.

While Excitebike involves racing across straight tracks and positioning yourself in the air to minimize your speed loss once you hit the ground, Motocross Champion has no midair controls, but it does have fully looping courses that move in 4 directions instead of just one. The turning is very nicely tuned to give you a good sense of speed while still maintaining control, so it feels great to take a complicated turn without hitting a wall.

While there is thankfully a practice mode that allows you to get acquainted with each course before a race, the real challenge of racing is juts not bumping into the other drivers. If you touch the back of another motorcycle, your bike immediately crashes and you lose precious time getting back on, so my winning strategy was to wait a second for the pack to start and then avoid the inevitable immediate crashes. The courses get pretty interesting with tons of tight turns, but the game's AI is also pretty ruthless (I don't think there's any rubber-banding here), so you have to generally finish a race with no crashes to win.

3/5, the best kart-racer like game I've played on the Famicom