Famicom Friday returns with the legendary bait-and-switch Paris-Dakar Rally Special

destructoid.com:

If there’s one Japanese trend that it’s maybe better off we missed out on in the Famicom era, it’s their non-games. Or anti-games, maybe? They were deliberate kusoge that played with the expectations players had learned in much more popular games. They were designed to confound. If the gameplay wasn’t obtuse, it was obnoxiously inconvenient, or insurmountably difficult.

That’s how you teach children what it’s like to be an adult.

I’m not sure if these were supposed to be funny, but the joke wears thin pretty quickly. Off the top of my head, I can name three of these games: the legendary Takeshi no Chousenjou, the bizarre Utsurun Desu, and 1988’s Paris-Dakar Rally Special. I think the latter is the most malicious because by looking at the name or cover art, you can’t really tell it’s anything but a racing game.

The Paris-Dakar Rally was an endurance race that, appropriately, started in Paris, France, and ended in Dakar, Senegal. Due to security concerns, it ended in 2008 and just became the Dakar Rally, moving to other regions. I guess some people don’t appreciate it when a bunch of rich people drive high-performance cars through impoverished areas of Western Africa.

Inequality aside, that’s not a bad idea to base a game on, but I don’t think the developers at ISCO, Inc really wanted to. I’m not sure they wanted to make a game at all. In fact, I feel like the notoriety behind Transformers: Convoy no Nazomight have motivated them to top it as an unfairly difficult kusoge.

Forget what you know about rally driving, which will be easy if you’re like me because I know very little. Paris-Dakar Rally Special starts you off trying to acquire a car, a sponsor, and a co-driver. This means walking the streets, entering every