YMMV / Rock n' Roll Racing

• Awesome Music:
  • Does recreating songs by Black Sabbath ("Paranoid"), George Thorogood and the Destroyers ("Bad to the Bone"), Steppenwolf ("Born to Be Wild") Henry Mancini ("The Peter Gunn Theme") and Deep Purple ("Highway Star") in 16-bit sound make them better or worse? Thanks to the efforts of the legendary Tim And Geoff Follin, it's safe to say better (they redid Jon Lord's keyboard solo note by note, for Chrissakes!).
  • Word of God stated that they did push the sound system of the SNES to get THAT awesome music. Even Shigeru Miyamoto himself was surprised and asked the developers how they did it. They did it by there being no instructions for the sound coding, and after figuring it out for themselves found out their way was better.
  • The Genesis version has one exclusive track: Golden Earring's "Radar Love".
• Game-Breaker: In 2 player mode, both players have their own passwords, but the programmers didn't consider the possibility that players could just use the same password for both players to essentially create another copy of either player: this by itself isn't that special, but since the players can't be on 2 different planets, the game priorizes the current location of player 1 when it comes to current league progress, which allows you to do things like using a password you get at the very beginning of the game for player 1 combined with a password that gives you a fully upgraded Havac for player 2 to essentially play the game from the beginning with the best vehicle in the game. You can then take player 2's now-updated password and copy it over to player 1, giving both players access to it and allowing them to effortlessly trounce the competition.
• Once Original, Now Common: A huge part of the game's novelty and appeal when it first came out was due to the inclusion of licensed famous rock songs, which was almost unheard of in video games at the time. Nowadays licensed music is much more common in video games, to the point where they can often invoke Revival by Commercialization^note And that trope used to be called the "Grand Theft Auto Effect" due to said video game franchise often invoking it for the licensed music it includes.
• Porting Disaster: The Game Boy Advance re-release of the game has colors so washed out that the palette swap animations are almost unnoticeable to the naked eye. They originally did this because otherwise the palette swap animation would not be noticeable on the original Game Boy Advance which lacks a backlight, but on the SP and Micro (as well as on the original DS) where there is a backlight, this resulted in washed out in the problems mentioned. Additionally the music were all cut short and they left out Golden Earring's Radar Love which was added as a bonus to the Genesis release,.
  • Additionally, they finally released the PC version, and release it for free no less. Except that the PC version was just the SNES ROM shoehorned into an emulator with all the licensed music expunged from the ROM file. Would it hurt just to get permission from the bands to release the tunes, ActiBlizz? Surely they'd be lenient given 1. they're only instrumental tracks and 2. The release is non-profit in that ActiBlizz will not be making a single cent off the release?
• Polished Port: On the other hand, the Genesis version has an added music track- Golden Earrings' Radar Love, and they managed to keep everything the SNES version had, including the announcer, and have it running just as smoothly on the Genesis. This despite the Genesis' more limited color palette and more restrictive sound architecture. The Definitive Edition in the Blizzard Arcade Collection meanwhile added the full songs plus 4-player splitscreen and widescreen support.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Moreso in VS than the main game, but BF's Slipsauce can get annoying as it never goes away after being dropped and makes you skid around. In all it's a minor example, as once all four racers are in Air Blades or better, you'll never see it again. The Bear Claw Mines used by the Air Blade can also be annoying as it actually damages you and they can pile up just the same as Slipsauce, but they do go away when triggered. You'll also see some of them laying around as hazards both before anyone has an Air Blade, and after everyone is using a Battle Trak or Havac (which both have drop weapons that detonate after a short period). VS shows how the Slipsauce can be truly annoying, as you can drop two with one charge, meaning that it's possible for two players to drop 14 of them each in a single lap, leading to a very big mess.
• Spiritual Successor: Both to Rare's R.C. Pro-Am, and to Blizzard's earlier RPM Racing.

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