Thread by @SandwichColonel

THREAD TIME !!
Gonna talk about a cool PC98 doujin game I found in that archive a couple days ago called Polestar

But first, a little bit about the developers, a group called Bio_100%
They created several games for the PC98 from the early to mid 90's, such as Stardust Chaser, Roli Roli Rolling, Sengoku Turb, and many many others

if that last title rings a bell then you might be familiar with the Dreamcast remake, which has a cult following because well just *look* at it

anyways, I remembered seeing Roli Roli Rolling once before in a list of PC98 homebrew games so I did some digging and as it turns out, Bio_100% has a website! And it's still up!

They have a bunch of reviews for several of the games they've made, and immediately Polestar caught my eye. It looked like an interesting Outrun clone

Bio_100% had attempted racing games before with the aforementioned Roli Roli Rolling, a game where you raced through gates. Polestar seemed to be much more ambitious though.

Trying to create a super-scaler styled racer on the PC98 at a reasonable speed would be extremely difficult since it can't do sprite scaling through hardware. So how did they do it?

Well, instead of using sprite scaling, all roadside objects and such are rendered using a *bunch* of rectangles, circles, and lines

And honestly? Despite looking super blocky, I think they pulled it off REALLY well!

Looks pretty smooth in motion too, here's the first track of the game. Seems like a homage to Virtua Racing's Big Forest track, right down to the U-turn at the end and what I'm assuming is supposed to be a Ferris Wheel lol

What I really love about this game is how much variety and detail each track has. Some tracks even have certain details depending on which lap you're on. For instance, lap 3 of the Seasons track adds apples to the trees. and lap 4 gives the trees autumn colors!

My favorite track visually has gotta be the Resort course, a seaside track that briefly takes you through a theme park and on lap 3 and onward you even get to see a waterfall! This actually blew me away the first time I played it, the details are soooo good

So it looks really nice, but how does it play? Imo it plays pretty well, the car drifts automatically once you start turning. It's awkward at first but rewarding to master, kinda gives me Ridge Racer vibes. You can take corners like a madman if you want lol

The game does have audio, but the only sound effect is the droning of you engine so I just left it mute in the videos.

You also have the option of a MIDI soundtrack. Most of it is just alright, but Night City?

hot *DAMN*

If you're using Neko Project 21 you can enable MIDI sound by going to MIDI options and setting MIDI output to Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth

here's a couple more screenshots just because I really like how this game looks

if you wanna give the game a go, here's a link to the .hdm so you don't have to download 1.2 GB (!!!) worth of doujin games just to play this one.

drive.google.com/file/d/1_UnhAV…

last thing I wanna mention is the time mechanic, which is probably the biggest knock I have against the game. Instead of having time extensions the game just gives you one long timer to make it through 4 laps.

The timer can be *very* strict, so crashing a couple times on certain tracks means you're screwed and you have to wait the timer out before trying again. It's definitely the most infuriating thing about the game, but it still comes highly recommended if you like the look of it

And yeah, that's Polestar! Hopefully you enjoyed this thread, I thought this game was too cool to not share it! At some point I'll probably record a playthrough of Course A & B in case people want to see more of the game without fiddling with a PC98 emulator haha

Finally, videos of each course. As far as I know these are the only complete playthroughs on Youtube! Also you might wanna turn the volume down, the audio quality isn't great.

it only shows the preview for one video, but each link goes to a different video