Game of the Week: Super Off Road for SNES

If you like the idea of jumping into a pickup truck and racing against some good buddies around a bumpy dirt track while avoiding bales of hay and sharp turns, have I got a video game for you.

It's called Super Off Road. And it is a-w-e-s-o-m-e!!!

Or at least the Super Nintendo version is, and that's the one I'm most familiar with, though I have played the original arcade game some, it titled Ivan "Ironman" Stewart's Super Off Road.


This is a fairly basic game. You race around a dirt track in a truck. As long as you keep winning or coming in one of the top three spots, you keep playing. If you lose, you're done.

Though basic, it's not a simple game. It'll take a while, but you have to get used to the odd physics in the game. Your truck won't always do exactly what you expect it to, especially when it's being bounced around by bumps and hills. Extra fun can be had when you use the turbo boost to give your truck that little extra something to win a race.

The graphics here are quite solid, being darn near arcade quality. The sounds, too, are quite superb and appropriate with engines running and background crowd noise.

As a nice little extra bonus, between races you can take your winning earnings and use them to spruce up your truck.

Super Off Road was popular enough that it got ported to other video game consoles of the time, the early 1990s, such as the Sega Genesis.