This is part 1 of my capture of me playing through the Championship mode in Top Gear 3000 for the SNES. This is not an emulator. This footage was recorded directly from my Super Nintendo using an actual Top Gear 3000 cartridge. I'm playing on hard mode.

Back in the early '90s I used to play various racing games with my uncle whenever I visited his house. We would play titles such as Rad Racer, Excitebike and Top Gear. Although I wasn't very good at those games, I enjoyed the fast action. Top Gear was especially fun because you could play through the entire game in a splitscreen two-player mode. The music was also incredible.

My brother and I later rented Top Gear 2 for our SNES around 1994 or so. I found that the upgrade system and the new full-screen support (for single-player racing) made for a better racing game, but the music wasn't as good as the prior game's.

Shortly after the Nintendo 64 was released I became interested in four-player games for my older systems, so I started looking into four-player titles for NES, SNES and Game Boy. I noticed that Top Gear 3000 supported four-player racing, so I asked for the game for Christmas of 1997. Although I received Top Gear Rally that Christmas, I didn't get Top Gear 3000.

Around 2000 I then picked up a used copy of Top Gear 3000 from Funcoland (now GameStop), and managed to play through the entire game on medium difficulty. I was instantly blown away by the amazing soundtrack, and the racing was really fun too. The game stuck to the basic design of Top Gear 2, but it used electric cars and recharge/repair strips on the tracks instead of pit stops. The game also included new upgrades such as the jump function. I even managed to try the four-player mode with my friends and was surprised by how well it ran. Overall, I was just highly impressed by the game.

Top Gear 3000 is a bit of a technical achievement for the SNES. Not only does it feature a four-player splitscreen racing mode, but it uses a custom chip called the DSP-4 which allows the tracks to split into multiple paths. As far as I'm aware, it's the only SNES game to use this chip. In addition, while editing this footage, I noticed that the game switches to a 480i mode during the blue background menu section where you choose your name and whatnot. It's quite unusual for an SNES game to feature a 480i mode, even if it's just for a single menu screen.

For this playthrough I'm completing the game on hard mode because that's the only way to race on all of the tracks. Since this game doesn't have a save system, I'll be utilizing the password feature to pick up from where I left off in each video. I hope you enjoy the footage, especially the kick-ass soundtrack.

In this first part I completed all of the races in the Merak and Zosmar systems.

Recorded with the Hauppauge HD PVR and the official SNES S-video cable at 60 frames per second. I used a Toshiba model D-R550 DVD Recorder to upconvert the SNES's native 240p signal to 480i so that the Hauppauge could capture the console's audio/video signal.

I'm using a Super Advantage joystick.

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