Cyclemania

As a kid I was obsessed with driving games, spending countless hours playing NFS 2 and 3 and constantly chasing my own track records. 20 years later today, I can close my eyes and vividly picture those tracks - regular, mirrored or reversed. That nostalgia is why I’m glad to add classic racing games to my collection. This biker game is a delight from the past. Fun, with a cool design that blends a third person bike view with a first person bike panel at the bottom of the screen. I've never seen a race game like this, I imagine it's also quite unique for its time. I tried “Quick Race” mode, which is a 2-lane mountain road. The game keeps your bike centered in the turn, so you only need to steer when overtaking or returning to your lane. You’ll encounter trucks, cows and police cars (act like regular cars) as obstacles. A nice detail is the violent shake of your bike when you’re squeezed between two cars. Overtaking is smooth, however, if you collide with rival bikes you will crash, so don't bump opponents trying to get them out of the way. I tried 2 tracks, while the maps change, the obstacles remain the same. A quick race is 5 laps, other modes are Championship and Select Race. …

Broken controls

Lovely organ donor simulator.

Cyclemania, developed by Compro Games and Accolade and now published by Ziggurat, stands as an eccentric but fascinating artifact from the early era of experimental racing games. Originally released in 1994, it was among a wave of titles that sought to merge full-motion video with interactive gameplay—a fusion that was both ambitious and technologically constrained by the standards of the time. The game uses actual filmed road footage as the foundation for its racing courses, layering player-controlled motorcycles and obstacles over pre-recorded video. This gives Cyclemania a distinctive texture, a sense of speed and realism that polygonal racers of its day could only approximate. It captures a moment in gaming history when developers were trying to push the limits of immersion through video technology, even if the results now feel dated and awkward by modern expectations. At its core, Cyclemania is a high-speed motorbike racer that places players behind the handlebars of a superbike tearing down winding mountain highways, desert stretches, and coastal roads. The sensation of movement is achieved through FMV backdrops that shift dynamically to simulate turns, slopes, and changes i…

5 bucks is an absolute steal for this. If you like old games with retro 3D graphics like Indy Car Racing II, you'll love this. I did manage to make it work with an Xbox controller, but using the arrow keys works fine. It plays a lot like Road Rash and Super Hang-On. While it's nothing compared to games like the Ride series, it's still a blast to fire up and race around.

This is what Road Rash should've been on the Sega CD instead of that lame MegaDrive port with CD music.