its common knowledge that trans American rally was never released in the shops, although it did get a limited release by mail order to members of the commander rom club in its later stages. not a great deal of people took up the offer, and so that makes 60+ possibly the rarest of all Philips Videopac's, it is also THE LAST official release, this was the end of the line for the Philips range. plans were afoot to release this game in the shops, but this was to be after Philips decided it was the end for the console, the plug was pulled and other games in development were stopped. There are no variations in either label design or covers...that I know of. well that's if you ignore the VG5000 release.
PLAYINGa 3d car racing game, the graphics are awesome for the time, they exceeded all other consoles. obviously a plus only game, so to enjoy this your going to need to get hold of a g7400 or a Jopac. What Other People Think ! I think when designing TAR, they had Activision's Enduro for the Atari 2600 in mind. Philips (or whoever coded the game) did a nice job regarding the graphics, but in my opinion the gameplay is miles behind Enduro. The game, especially the steering, is just not "balanced" (the same in Helicopter Rescue). It really seems that the rushed those last game out without doing a lot of testing. Both, HR and TAR, just play "rough". When playing TAR a bit, you get into it, so today I managed to make it two times to New York in one game, rewarding me with a score of 2030 points. The difference between normal conditions, night and snow is nice, the car is really difficult to steer from Chicago to New York. But again, Enduro has more, it just plays "smoother". I don't know if that is because the 2600 is just more powerful, or the Activision programmer's did just a better job. I presume the second. I think TAR could have been at least as good as Enduro. Dieter Koenig of CCC
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