In today’s morning post I mentioned that I would talk about another new game from Ace Amusement, as found on the UDC Distributor website, so here we are to give that a highlight. This one is called Nitro Speed, where long-time readers will be able to see where some of the influences came from – apart from the name, where Play Mechanix released their Nitro Trucks game last year:
If you’ve been reading the site here for a while, then you’ll notice that the cabinet shares a lot in common with Hot Wheels: King of the Road by Adrenaline Amusements & Coin Crew, which was released at the end of 2019. There is a 4-player version of that game in case you missed it, which is kind of what this cabinet design is aiming for.
That said, there are some differences, particularly in the flashier portions where the steering wheels attach; The game itself is also not an exact clone of Hot Wheels. Instead, the gameplay is reminiscent of the various kid racers out there (like Hot Racers or Bigfoot Crush, where you drive along an open-circuit course collecting items and power-ups, which in itself is borrowing a page from Mario Kart), but the graphics are surprisingly decent, with a solid framerate and good lighting:
Per the UDC product page, there are four cars to drive and three tracks to compete on, which is fairly low as far as variety goes, but seems par for the course on these kinds of games. The addition of loop-de-loops is a bit unusual here, although I certainly haven’t played all of these kid-racer clones that have come out of China over the past few years, so it’s possible someone did it before. Hot Wheels KotR has them…otherwise, the last standard arcade racer to use them in tracks (as I recall) was Twisted.
Distributor UDC is also billing this one as a videmption game, although I imagine that amusement-only play is available in the software options. It is also only available in territories like China and Europe at the moment, although imports have become fairly popular with a lot of venues out there. What do you think about it from the info above?
The new racing game by IGS and GameLoft.