Uniracers (known as Unirally in Europe) is a 1994 Super Nintendo Entertainment System Racing Game developed by DMA Design (now a part of Take-Two Interactive and known as Rockstar North) and published by Nintendo.
Uniracers features riderless unicycles with personalities racing against each other and performing tricks on a two-dimensional plane, which provides some platform gaming features, such as jumping over pits.
Tropes associated with Uniracers
- Animate Inanimate Object: The unicycles. Even though they don't have riders, they do have personalities and act as if they are alive.
- Bowdlerize: The original American instruction manual, when describing the Zee-Flip, says, "[...]anyone who can't come to grips with it is a total knob." Ironically, "knob" is one of the words dubbed "not cool enough" by the game. When the game came to Europe, the manual was rewritten so that "knob" was replaced with "idiot".
- The Cameo: Yoshi makes an appearance after completing the gold-level contests in one of the tours.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience:
- Sections of the track have specific color patterns that signify upcoming hazards.
- The color of the chosen unicycle also determines what they say after a successful trick combo.
- Comeback Mechanic: Becomes apparent when you let two player unicycles run side-by-side without speed-boosts; each will fall behind in turn and catch up at the same interval. This can be exploited in 1-Player mode on circuit tracks to gain better lap records.
- Happy Dance: One of the animations for the winning unicycle.
- Head Desk: One of the animations for the losing unicycle.
- Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Each of the game's nine tours have names such as "Crawler", "Sprinter", and "Hunter". However, almost every tour has more sensible difficulty levels with the names Bronze, Silver, and Gold.
- Interface Screw:
- The final set of contests against the Anti-Uni, who will occasionally reverse the player's controls and flip the screen upside-down. Each one serves as a "computer is a cheating bastard" moment.
- The game's ending, oddly enough, punishes the computer for being a cheating bastard. Headlines are showing reading "New Uni wins despite dirty tactics" and "Anti-Uni in custody."
- Minus World: Normally there are halfpipes specifically placed to prevent you from falling outside the bounds of any track. However, a glitch in Last One lets you bypass a checkpoint, so that when you reach the finish line the race doesn't stop. If you go over the edge of the finish line, you fall into empty space where the unicycle makes very erratic movements. Enough wandering will eventually take you back to the track.
- My Rules Are Not Your Rules: If you listen to the sound effects of the computer players, they occasionally seem to pull off stunt combinations not normally possible, such as two Double Rolls (not a Roll City) in one jump.
- Nitro Boost: Successfully landing a trick will reward the player with a short boost of speed; more complex stunt combinations will result in stronger boots.
- Punny Name: In solo play, the name of the computer-controlled opponent is somewhat relative to the difficulty setting: Bronsen for Bronze, Silvia for Silver, and Goldwyn for Gold. However, this does NOT apply to the Anti-Uni.
- Rubber-Band A.I.: Mostly noticeable on the higher difficulty settings.
- Take That!: Entering either Sega or Sonic for a unicycle's name will result in being deemed "not cool enough" to use during the game. Sonic actually gets a double-dose of Take That! as, within the final set of races, the game occasionally will play at "Hedgehog Speed", which makes the game as fast as a slide show.
- Tech-Demo Game: The entire point of the game was to demonstrate that the SNES could achieve the same rapid scrolling as the Sega Genesis. The game succeeds in this, but since the SNES was built for graphical power over speed, pulling it off also necessitated that the graphics and number of onscreen objects be reduced to a minimum to maintain the smooth scrolling at fast speeds.
- Totally Radical: Some of the quotes spouted out by the unicycles fit this.
- Video Game Perversity Prevention: If you try to rename Unis with words such as "shit", "Satan", "jizz", "lesbian", etc., they will be rejected as "not cool enough".
