Rad Racer

Rad Racer or Highway Star is basically Square's take on OutRun. Playing the game with the Power Glove and 3D glasses is very cool and impressive.

Notably this would be the first Famicom game Nasir Gebelli programmed for Square, unless you count The 3-D Battles of World Runner for the Famicom Disk System a few months prior. It's also the game that proved to be a massive success for Square and practically saved the company from its previous failures. Later, the game would be published outside of Japan by Nintendo and would be one of the three games featured in the Nintendo World Championships 1990 competition game.

Course Select#

After selecting a vehicle, press B the number of times for the course you want to select. The speed meter will increase with each press. Then, hold Up + Right and press Start.

Presses	Course
0	Course 1
1	Course 2
2	Course 3
3	Course 4
4	Course 5
5	Course 6
6	Course 7
7	Course 8

A similar stage select method was used in the sequel.

Regional Differences#

Title Screen#

Japan	US/Europe

The Japanese title is a possible reference to the 1972 song "Highway Star" by Deep Purple, and may have been changed to avoid copyright infringement. Both versions of the title screen are rendered in a similar style, but the Rad Racer title screen adds a trademark (™) symbol.

Despite the name change, the "HS" logo seen on the vehicle select screen was left intact.

Vehicle Select#

Japan	US/Europe

The Japanese version has a typo in the text "PRESS START TO BIGIN" which was corrected in the international version to "PRESS START TO BEGIN".

3D#

Japan	US/Europe

Pressing Select during gameplay will switch the game into its 3D mode.

The Japanese version was one of the few games to support the Famicom 3D System, which used active shutter glasses. Since this peripheral wasn't released outside of Japan, the international versions changed this to the simpler anaglyphic system for use with basic red/cyan glasses.

...or at least it attempted to. The game still used the rapid flicker effect from the shutter system, simply changing the palette of each frame that was supposed to go into each eye. Since both images couldn't be displayed on-screen simultaneously, the effect had mixed results from display to display (later becoming ineffective in the modern day).

FDS Text#

There are some unused FDS-related strings among the demo's HUD strings: "PLEASE WAIT" at $DB53, "PLACE SIDE B" at $DB62, and "PLACE SIDE A" at $DBE9.

Anti-Piracy#

This game contains a similar anti-piracy check to that found in Final Fantasy. If the any of the 5 bytes "NASIR" are changed at CPU address $DBC4, the game will intentionally crash when it tries to draw the Start->Goal meter.