Rennspiel

Set the field to 16 and they all fit on the line. You have three rockets,
three charges of nitro and two things to leave lying behind you - and so has
the car in front. Rennspiel is a top-down racer that takes after the 16-bit
ones: the whole corner on one screen, a field close enough to touch, and
nothing in it that will apologise.Race dirty
Rockets go forward. A mine or a slick of oil goes out the back - the garage
decides which one you are carrying.

A mine is blind to the car that dropped it until that car has once driven
clear of it. A lap later it bites its owner like anybody else.

Oil lies on the road for three laps, counted in racing rather than in
seconds, and pales as it soaks away. The corner that was clean on lap one is a
trap on lap two.

Sit in the hole another car punches in the air and half your drag is gone:
eight per cent over your own top speed. A tow is how you pass a car of your own
class without firing a thing.

A car that is written off goes up on the spot, and the wreck lies where it
died - drivable straight through - until it comes back. Only water and the gaps
take a car whole.
The track keeps the receipts
Rubber where somebody was sideways, black smears behind whoever went
through the oil, ruts in the sand, scratches on the ice, flattened grass, and
scorch where a rocket went off that outlives all of it. Rain washes the road
clean again in a couple of laps.

Trains, level crossings, barriers, jumps, bridges and tunnels. The trains
and the barriers run on the race clock alone, so arriving at a crossing at the
wrong moment is nobody's fault but yours.

Every track brings its own sky: the harbour is raced in the rain, the old
town at night, the ice pass at dusk.
Eight championships
Eight cups of four races, fields of 8 to 12, prize money and points.

A shop between the races: engine, tyres, armour, nitro, launcher,
ammunition, rear weapon, repairs. Damage and ammunition carry over from one
race into the next, so a cup is driven with what is left of the car.

A podium unlocks the next cup. The last race of one ends on a real podium,
with the trophy and the stadium's fireworks.

Four difficulty levels, and inside them every driver has their own skill
and their own temper - how readily they shoot, what they spend their money on,
whether they are the sort to take the shortcut.
2 to 4 players, one screen
Press A on the pad you mean to drive with, or the accelerator of a free
block of keys, and you are sitting down. Four pads, four blocks on the one
keyboard - W, the arrows, I and Num 8 - or any mix of the two: a seat belongs
to whatever took it, and no other device can touch it. Nobody has to own a pad,
and nobody has to share one hand of keys.

Two race in columns, three or four take a quarter each - and because three
leave a quarter over, the track map moves in there, one big one for the room.

A party can drive a whole championship this way, everybody in a stock car,
points counted seat by seat.
LAN: one person per machine
Everybody on the same network, one driver per screen. The lobby finds the
rooms by itself - a game that is open says so on the network and turns up in
the list with its name, its track and how full it is.

Host from inside the game, or run a dedicated server headless and let the
room fill up around it.

The grid holds 16 either way, and every place on it nobody takes is filled
by the AI.

A track the host drew and you have never seen arrives over the wire while
the lobby is still open.
Online over Steam
The same race against anybody, anywhere: rooms found through Steam's
matchmaking rather than by shouting on one network.

Invite friends out of the lobby itself, and take an invitation from the
overlay. If the game is not even running, the invitation starts it and puts you
in the room.

It is the same lobby LAN opens, with the switch between the two still in
it, so a room can change its mind about which one it is on.
Twenty-four tracks, and then yours
The editor draws the road as a graph of nodes and edges, paints tiles over
it, drops in jumps, oil, barriers and railway lines, sets the starting grid -
and takes the whole thing for a drive before you have saved it once.

A track you save turns up in the single player menu and in the lobby
straight away.

Every track keeps a record board. Nothing a computer drove has ever reached
one.
The rest of it
German and English, keyboard or gamepad.

35 achievements and Steam Cloud.

Runs on a Steam Deck - everything except the track editor, which wants a
keyboard and a middle mouse button and says so.