I'll get it out straight away: I LOVE Screamer. Loved it back then, still loving it to this very day. Often criticised due to its floaty, tank controls and steep difficulty, I believe it's among those - very few - classic arcade racers that aged better, and are still super fun to play. Sure, it requires a bit of practice, and it's true, cars handle nowhere near 'realistically', but once you get into the game's flow, it's a blast to play: it's fast, tense (yet always fair), the tracks are fantastic - all different to each other and equally interesting - and their design is so spot on anyone can win with any car... Oh, and the Bullet is some hilarious ride, folks: it definitely pays off the sweat required to unlock it.
WRF is pretty sweet, on the whole: visually VERY appealing (especially if 'scaler' games by SEGA and Taito are your kinda thing), it sounds great and it runs super smooth, exactly as you want your arcade racers to be. Where does it fall, then? Well, in my opinion, it's a little bit too cheap, to the point it gets frustrating. With no Practice or Single Race modes, to help you getting accustomed to the (often evil) track design, the only way to git gud is to engage the classic world championship over and over again, and... Well, prepare to get decimated by one of the most relentlessly aggressive AI I've ever seen in a game like this one. Trials and tribulations will eventually pay, even though World Rally Fever remains quite brutal overall: its cute, anime look is definitely deceiving.
Aye, count me in for the 'it's decent, could've been awesome' chorus. Game has great visuals, solid, retro inspired mechanics, and fantastic level design. Oh yeah, it's also stupidly hard. One thing it doesn't have: a checkpoint system - even a single one per stage would've been enough - to make the journey enjoyable for anyone who isn't a master of platforming, with godlike skills. I'd give the game 2.5 stars, if I could, so I'll round my score to 3, since I still believe 2 is too harsh, for something that is not broken per se (some Viking ninjas finished it no problem). Just... Beware. If you're anything in between an average-to-decent player, there's a strong chance you're not gonna see more than a couple of stages, in Volgarr, before getting fatally annoyed.
