At first glance you’d probably think that the San Francisco Rush games would be about straight up racing, and you’d be kind of right. It is a racing game, but it’s kind of a backhanded slap to your racing game sensibilities.
Now you could race around the tracks against the computer-controlled opponents, but that’s not going to do you much good. Your car, for some reason, is absolutely incapable of attaining the same top speed as your opponents, which makes the race kind of tough to win. To make any kind of headway you have to make exorbitant use of the shortcuts placed around the track. But the thing is, these shortcuts require ridiculous amounts of dexterity and a little touch of luck to successfully maneuver through them. That’s all assuming you can even find the things. The shortcuts are frequently placed in apparently inaccessible or in insane places to get to so you kind of have to race around the track a few times just looking for places to drive off the beaten path to find the correct combination of secret passageways that you have navigate with ridiculous amounts of skill to maybe not come in last.
Translated that means that this game is going to cost you a lot of money to get good at.
Yeah, you could race through the game and not hit any of the shortcuts and have a degree of fun with the game. But also in those shortcuts are these weird coins that you can collect. Collect enough of them and you get to unlock stuff like extra cars. Of course, it’s an arcade game, so there’s no way to save your progress, right?
Wrong!
This game asks you to put in a 10-digit PIN (like your phone number) to use when you’re sitting at that particular machine. And what that did was to track some stats on that machine. Which was actually pretty awesome. Once you go through the registration process one time, every other time you sit at that machine you could just throw in your phone number and away you’d go with your stuff unlocked that you’ve worked so hard to get. Of course that also meant that you’d be spending a lot of time at that particular machine unlocking everything, which was really only good for lining the pockets of the arcade owners. Which I was willing to do fairly regularly.