For today’s CVGM I’m going to show you the greatest SNES game that no one ever played:

Uniracers.

See, back before Rockstar was Rockstar and making games about carjacking, they made a game about alternate-universe sentient unicycles who spent their days racing around on colorful tracks, doing stunts. This sounds like a rather, uh… interesting premise but boy, did they ever pull it off. The basic formula for this game was that doing stunts (jumping, spinning, flipping, etc.) made you go faster, so you had to do as many stunts as possible to win. However, in a game where the track goes up and down and twirls around and makes unexpected hairpin turns, doing a stunt at the wrong moment is likely to hurl you into a wall, which would cause you to lose a lot of time.

The solution?

Multicolored tracks which you learn to “read”. A normal blue-and-green striped track means it’s all clear and you’re okay to do stunts. Red-and-blue means be careful: some big jump or twist is likely coming up. Orange-and-yellow means be on the lookout for unusual obstacles, solid yellow means a shortcut is coming up, and finally, blue-and-yellow means you’re seconds away from the finish line.

This all probably sounds either very complicated or very simple. Trust me though: the execution was brilliant.

The trick to this game was that you could learn how to squeeze the most out of every inch of racetrack– and that was something you had to do if you wanted to beat the more difficult opponents.

Uniracers comes with dozens of racetracks and a sense of speed rivaling that of Sonic the Hedgehog. Of course, Rockstar, not do be outdone on that last point, allows you to name your Unicycles anything except Sonic or Sega… you will be informed that said name “isn’t cool enough”.

The Super Nintendo has got to be one of the greatest game systems of all time so narrowing its games down to “favorites” is difficult to say the least, but this game sucked up far, far too much of my SNES time back in the day, and it was worth it.