Road Rash II

Road Rash II is a 1992 racing and vehicular combat game developed and published by Electronic Arts (EA) for the Sega Genesis.

It is the second installment in the Road Rash series and introduces a split-screen two-player mode for competing human players, nitrous oxide charges on certain bikes, and chains as offensive weapons.

Road Rash II met with critical acclaim and commercial success, with reviewers appreciating the visuals and addition of the multiplayer mode while pointing out the lack of innovation in the fundamental gameplay.

[1] The game's races take place in a number of settings across the United States, consisting of Hawaii, Arizona, Tennessee, Alaska, and Vermont.

[3][4] The racer can be ejected from their bike if they crash into an obstacle (such as boulders, cars, deer and cows[1]) or if they run out of stamina (shown in the bottom-left corner of the screen) due to fights with opponents.

[5][6] Certain bikes are equipped with a series of nitrous oxide charges, which can provide a burst of speed if the player quickly taps the acceleration input button twice.

The bike will be wrecked if the meter fully depletes, which ends the player's participation in the current race and deducts the cost of a repair bill from the racer's balance.

Motor officers make sporadic appearances throughout the game's tracks, and can also end the player's participation if they apprehend the racer following a crash, which deducts the cost of a fine from their balance.

It happened locally, and people would run these races surreptitiously and do them in back roads where nobody knew about them – kind of a Fight Club thing.

[9] The expansion to an 8-megabit format from the original game's 5 megabits allowed the team to implement a split-screen two-player mode that they were unable to incorporate into the preceding title.

Road Rash II includes cutscenes that play at the end of a race, which were conceptualized as a reward based on the player's performance.

[14] Richard Leadbetter and Radion Automatic of Mean Machines Sega commended the two-player mode, additional bikes, fast visuals and varied backgrounds, but felt that the fundamental gameplay was barely changed from the previous title, and they considered the music to be inferior to that of the original game.

[15] Gideon of GamePro was grateful for the inclusion of the split-screen two-player mode, the lack of which he felt "kept the first Road Rash from achieving 'instant classic' status", and deemed the sequel to be "a noteworthy improvement on an already excellent game".

[25] Paul Wooding and Adrian Pitt of Sega Force warned readers of the game's similarity to its predecessor, but praised the multiplayer modes as "magic" and the sense of speed and graphic effects as "amazing".

[26] The four reviewers of Electronic Gaming Monthly considered the gameplay to still be solid and fun, but saw little difference in that factor from its predecessor, and were disappointed in the lack of detail in the two-player mode's graphics compared to the single-player campaign, though the audio was said to "really pop".

An example of two-player gameplay in the Genesis version of Road Rash II . The game's larger cartridge size compared to its predecessor allowed the feature to be introduced in this installment of the series.