Thrill Drive

Thrill Drive is a street racing sim arcade game released by Konami in 1998. And it was titled in the Arcade Flyer of this game: FAST-PACED ACTION!, in the front of the foreign flyer accidentally. It is closely similar to Racing Jam Chapters 1 and 2, in the Arcades and this game is a prequel to those 2 NWK-TR Games. Unlike many driving games, this was the unique game that it was to be the controlled-driving skill game to be much careful of driving while you hit the stand-out performance.

Taking place in either the U.S.A., Japan, or Europe, the player must race three other opponents to the finish line without crashing into objects such as pedestrians that suddenly appear or causing accidents as well as avoid police cars along the way. Also, like various Sega driving games such as Hang-On and OutRun, the scenery can change at any time. The player has an assortment of vehicles to choose from, such as a sports car, a sedan, a station wagon, an SUV, a convertible, a bus, and a truck.

The game is notable for the special effects when a player crashes. This is signified by the sound of a loud crash, police sirens wailing and then a screaming woman + 2 shocking images with a violet-colored effect followed by the game screen showing a broken windshield as if you had crashed into something—as this would become a theme in later games in the series—and show a violent image before resetting you at the place where you made the mistake. As you crash and reset, the weather and sky will dramatically change from a clear day to dark clouds as if it were to rain and then a thunderstorm if you crash later in the game and reset.

Upon crossing checkpoints, the music will change to something different, or positive. However, if a player crashes and resets, the music will change to a negative, dramatic piece. Also notable is when a player finishes a race depending on how much time was left on the clock. When this happens, the computer will rate your driving technique as well as add up how many accidents the player had and how much money in damage the player has caused—and assigns a final rating, which can suffer badly if too many objects are hit or accidents are caused.

Since this was, a very rare game, it was been likely to be forever lost; but fortunately, other players would like to play in MAME, than instead of playing in a real arcade machine of this game, because it was only found out that it was very popular in Japan elsewhere, also outside of Japan to play this game. Plus, other reasons to be rare is, having very damaged board of this game or having several failures of this game, including the Analog Devices, ROM, RAM, SDRAM, NVRAM and more. The real system reqirements of this game for MAME is unknown yet, by reaching it from MAME Ver. 0.147, but it needs Nvidia and AMD powerful GPU Cards, also Intel with the help of the CPU like Intel i3, AMD Sempron, AMD Athlon XP or better.

( NOTE: For some dedications and speciality in MAME, this game would have 50/50 chance, it's either would be FULLY PLAYABLE or LAGGING PLAYABLE. And sometimes, you'd got NETWORK ERROR while playing the game in Modern MAME Versions, because of having SPEEDY network trouble to Intel i7 or other variations. Also, it's not playable on Older MAME Versions because of the NETWORK ERROR again.)