Road Runner's Death Valley Rally (SNES) Playthrough
114,721
Published 2022-04-09
From the MacVentures to Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective to Beavis & Butthead: Virtual Stupidity, ICOM was responsible for several celebrated adventure games in their time. They were also responsible for some truly terrible action games, including the likes of Ghost Manor and Yo Bro!
Road Runner's Death Valley Rally isn't the worst game they made. I'll give it that much credit.
Following the Sonic mascot-platformer blueprint, the game puts you in control of the Road Runner as he streaks across fifteen stages in an attempt to escape being murdered by Wile E. Coyote.
If nothing else, Death Valley Rally certainly looks the part. Reviewers raved over the quality of the graphics, often saying that it looked just like the cartoon upon which it was based, and they were totally right. Even thirty years later, it still looks fantastic. The characters are dead ringers for their TV counterparts, and the animation is just as convincing.
Just like in the cartoon, Wile E. has a huge variety of ACME-branded implements of destruction that he wields as inexpertly as ever. He gets a brand new gadget for every stage, and a lot of the game's fun comes from seeing what he'll use next...providing you can ever make it past the first few levels.
The problem with Death Valley Rally is that the gameplay didn't see a fraction of the effort that the developers invested in nailing the look and feel of the show.
The controls are a nightmare: Road Runner skids on every surface as if it was ice, and his jump is floaty and imprecise so you'll constantly have to correct jumps in midair to avoid overshooting platforms. The collision detection feels off, too - Road Runner's collision box is narrower than his sprite, so you'll miss jumps that look like you should've been able to make just fine, over and over again.
The stages are built so that'll you'll need a lot speed to clear certain obstacles - just like Sonic - but the game is fond of throwing obstacles and pitfalls in your path without fair warning, and Wile E. Coyote regularly flies through the screen to attack without any sort of heads up. The inordinate number of blind jumps and unavoidable hits you end up taking puts a huge damper on the overall experience.
Nintendo Power's coverage of this one was telling. NP usually avoided overt criticism of the games they covered, but Death Valley Rally's feature goes out of its way to tell you how sloppy the controls are, and it does so on more than one occasion.
Road Runner's Death Valley Rally is an unfortunate example of what happens when style is prioritized over substance. It looks fantastic, but once you hit start, that controller suddenly becomes a stick of Acme dynamite in your hands.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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All Comments (21)
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The game incentivizes you to speed up and at the same time punishes you by doing so.
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You nailed it in your description: this game is style over substance. I rented this game once and all I remember is that Roadrunner felt like he was on rollerblades with no brakes. It was like playing Arkanoid with a regular NES controller.
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Oh boy, I remember the difficulty of this game. This was before the times of the internet. This game was no joke, but I managed to beat it despite how weird the controls felt at times.
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Death Valley Rally looks amazing, but it fails spectacularly at being fun.
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This game has some really impressive sprites that really represent the Looney Tunes well but it's really hard to control. Road Runner slides all over the place when he's running. It was really frustrating when I was a kid and rented this from the Video Store. I managed to beat the first stage but, I don't remember getting any further than that.
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I remember when I was a kid, I ended up with a copy of this. I traded a kid I met on a vacation to Puerto Rico. I forgot what I traded him, but this is what I brought back to the states. Never understood how to play it well. But I just liked it.
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This is one of those games that should have been a home run, but falls flat on its face.
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Lol, you can tell how badly the player wanted to be over with the construction level. Forget getting a perfect.
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Stage 1 was near impossible when I was a kid. I was given this as a kid for Christmas and while I never thought the controls were bad, maybe a lil slippery the constant hazards the track layouts and platforming really made this one frustrating. The worst thing was it took months to beat the first 3 levels of the first stage. The boss took me 15 years to finally get through, and another 5 years after that of just going through the other stages. What really sucked about this game was the levels are so painful to get through but that final boss I was able to beat my first time through. The last boss is such a pushover, I felt more anger than satisfaction. That first boss was criminally hard, the next one just brutal, but the further you get into the game the bosses are easier and easier. This is not a fun game at all. If you want to get your Road Runner fix on an old console, Desert Demolition for the Genesis/Mega Drive is a much smoother fun experience.
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If only the presentation of this game could've been combined with Desert Demolition "Starring The Road Runner". Then we'd have the ultimate game of cat and mouse "or in this case Coyote and Road Runner".
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This game was the bane of my existence when I was a child
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The SunSoft sound effect on the logo stuck with me from Blockbuster Rentals.
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I remember this one. Many can agree that Desert Demolition for the Genny is better.
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I can't believe I finally found out what this game was called and that I didn't have mandela effect and actually played this game about 10 years ago. I remember trying to find games about roadrunner and coyote but there was nothing good except for Desert Demolition, and after surfing through 20 pages on Google I found this. Lol I always thought that was just a dream
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I’m convinced the only reason this was featured on one of Nintendo Power covers is because Nintendo saw it as an answer to Sonic
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Oh Darling thank you so much for uploading these great 90s SNES games.
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I just played this Game once only to watch roadrunner die. Real history x33 Coyote's perseverance is priceless
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I've tried to finish it several times over the last decades, and now, reading the video descripción as well as the comments, I see I'm not the only one who just can't understand the game and even less stay with it long enough. That's a shame since it really has some appeal.
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Just like one of Wile's ACME gadgets, it looks great but fails to deliver on proper functionality. That's too bad because I love these characters.
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