PixlBit

The Speed Rumbler, 1986, is basically Mad Max. You live in a post-apocalyptic wasteland plagued with car gangs, one of which has kidnapped your family. You have 24 hours (actually 24 minutes, I think) to get them back. You do that by driving and shooting your way through six top down stages, and it starts off pretty well. Your car drives a little stiffly but it's manageable. There are a lot of bad guys to shoot, both in other cars and on foot, as well as other hazards like exploding barrels and boulders. You can also free prisoners from little standalone jails for bonuses and power ups. If your car takes too much damage, it will catch on fire and you need to get out of it ASAP. It's cool that you can go on foot even if you're probably gonna die. If you can survive and make some forward progress, a new car will be dropped off for you. It seems like a missed opportunity, however, that you cannot jump in an empty enemy car. You'll just die and instant deaths is one of my big pet peeves with this game. Okay, you're very vulnerable when not in your car; that makes sense. But there are enemies with instantly kill your car no matter how much life you have. That is super frustrating. Continuing that theme is the time limit. You have to beat the game in 24 minutes, which gives you 4 minutes to beat each of the six levels, and the game makes this a hard limit. If you hit 4 minutes before reaching the end of the level, you gotta start it all over. So doing well on earlier levels does you no good in the later levels. You get no time bonus.

But what killed the game for me was the way it was designed to favor your enemies. I got to a part that, quite frankly, I don't how you could get past without getting murdered or running out of time from playing really cautiously. It was the culmination of increasingly unfair design and I just don't have time for it, which stinks because the game is pretty fun and different. Unfortunately, not even being able to pump in (virtual) quarters can fix this game's issues.