Download Interstate 76 Patch Collection • Patches & Fixes @ The Iso Zone • The Ultimate Retro Gaming Resource. [f2f] no CD Interstate '76: NitroPack v1.0 ENG Add new comment. Your name (Login to post using username, leave blank to post as Anonymous) Your name. —The Internet Archive Team. Community Software MS-DOS CD-ROM Software Software Sites CD-ROM Software Library Tucows Software Library APK. Interstate '76 v1.

Every game released before 2015 is being destroyed. We only have time to rescue one game from each year. Not those you’ve played to death, or the classics that the industry has already learned from. We’re going to select the games that still have more to give. These are the.

There’s a moment just seconds into ’s intro cinematic that I think neatly captures its spirit: two American hot rods are, one firing its roof-mounted machine guns perfectly in sync with the wacka-wacka funk guitar underpinning the scene, while the other weaves from side to side in front of it, also in time with the music. There are probably a total of seventy polygons onscreen, and yet the game’s stylistic vision and world of bizarre menace are communicated instantly.

Set in an alt-history southwestern USA in which the 1973 oil crisis provoked the rise of criminal gangs and a resultant vigilante uprising, Interstate ‘76 is a vehicular combat game as concerned with nailing an aesthetic as it is with the mechanics of cars shooting at one another. It’s a game that achieves remarkable harmony between its visual style, narrative and what you do as the player, and it does so in a world that’s not quite seventies pastiche or fantasy dystopia. Instead, it’s something strange and distinct in between the two. It is the game release of 1997 that should be preserved forevermore. Settings and plot arcs in vehicular combat games are preposterous by necessity, of course, because they have to accommodate a) the existence of wholly impractical machines and b) people solving their every problem by driving those machines. Interstate ‘76 is preposterous, then, but because its visual design, soundtrack and core mechanics reinforce its ideas so well, it’s the kind of preposterous you can get behind.

Player-character Groove Champion is mixed up in all this highway warfare by sheer chance. He finds himself behind the wheel of a modded, weaponised Picard Piranha after his vigilante sister ticks off the wrong crime lord and winds up catching a fatal (or is it, etc.) bullet. Activate Softraid/fakeraid. He’s horrified to learn she was caught up in that world, but at the same time feels an irresistible sense of duty to follow the same path. Mentor Taurus, who partnered Groove’s sister before she died, is there to make sure he fulfils that obligation.

Keep in mind that this is a driving-shooty game from 1997; it would have been ample exposition to tell the player, ‘You’re a vigilante. Go shoot these cars.’ Instead, Interstate ‘76 strived for something with more character. Talismanic of that attitude is the now legendary poem button in the controls list. You press the ‘x’ key and Groove asks, “Hey Stampede, how about a poem?” Taurus obliges with one of 15 different pieces, and he’s not half bad at waxing lyrical. Playing in situ at age 11, it was probably the best poetry I’d ever heard. “I’m a storm torrent across a slate-gray sea,” he might begin. Or, “They twist like quad-coiled vipers, feeding on combustion’s waste.” Taurus’ unwavering commitment to fulfilling Groove’s request can lead to moments of unexpected poignancy – he’ll recite lines even when coming under heavy attack from landmines, machinegun fire, or helicopters.

I’m not proud of it, but I used to ask him for a poem when his smoking car appeared to be in real trouble in the hope of seeing him explode mid-verse. The options menus and map screen are worthy of mention too, if you can believe it. Graphical options, control customisation and all the rest are written out as items on a menu from Joe’s Fish Shack, while maps for each mission are scrawled on restaurant napkins. When you exit the game, a note from someone presumably under Joe’s employment asks “Are you leaving me, sweetheart?” These are small details, and they wouldn’t save Interstate ‘76 if the fundamentals weren’t in place, but they do demonstrate how far that commitment to stylistic consistency runs in this game. The inhuman angles, featureless faces and girder-like fingers of Interstate ‘76’s low-poly cast of characters should by all rights make it look as dated as snap bracelets, yet it’s employed so effectively to tell the story of alt-seventies vigilantes that it looks in many ways perfectly modern, even now.