Super Off Road - Four-Player Mode (Actual NES Capture)

This is a capture of me and three friends playing Ivan "Ironman" Stewart's Super Off Road for the NES. This is not an emulator. This footage was captured directly from my NES using an actual Super Off Road cartridge and an NES Four Score accessory. I'm player one (red truck), Luke is player two (yellow truck), Michael is player three (blue truck), and John is player four (green truck).

Around the beginning of the Nintendo 64 era I started becoming really interested in four-player gaming on my retro systems (NES, SNES and Game Boy). I started looking into old four-player games that I never played before and began acquiring specific titles that I thought looked fun (as well as the requisite multitaps for each system).

Somewhere around 1999 I ordered a Four Score multitap for my NES from Funcoland (now known as GameStop), as well as Super Off Road, which was a notable four-player game. Ironically, the SNES version of the game doesn't support more than two players, so the NES version is the way to go for multiplayer.

I'm not sure if I played Super Off Road in the arcade before I played the NES version, but I at least played a similar title: Super Sprint. So I was familiar with the gameplay.

I always liked off road racing, so Super Off Road seemed like a good pick for a four-player NES game. It certainly was. The racing is fast, simple and fun, and there's an upgrade system as well so you can increase your truck's handling and top speed.

I actually managed to utilize the four-player mode with my friends back during my high school years (around 2000). It was a lot of fun, but unfortunately, the fun doesn't last too long because eventually people will start to get disqualified and get a game over. The CPU will take over that person's truck at that point and race ridiculously fast.

The same thing happened here. We raced for a decent amount of time and then Luke got disqualified. Eventually, Michael and John got disqualified as well and I was left by myself. I made it past Race 50 and then just gave up. Odds are that I would have gotten a game over soon after that.

I think the game goes until Race 99, then it gives you a ranking screen. However, I've never made it that far. It would probably take two hours to do that.

Recorded with the Hauppauge HD PVR and a composite connection at 60 frames per second. I used a Toshiba model D-R550 DVD Recorder to upconvert the NES's native 240p signal to 480i so that the Hauppauge could capture the console's audio/video signal.

I'm using an NES Advantage joystick, Luke is using an NES Max turbo controller, and Michael and John are using standard NES controllers. We used a Four Score accessory to enable four controller ports.