Fatal Racing

That's gonna hurt in the morning...

"It's Fatal Racing!!!"

Fatal Racing (known as Whiplash in the US) is a PC racing game that can best be described as Race Driving meets Destruction Derby. Eight teams of two race on courses until either all human players have crossed the finish line (or are destroyed 3 times) or only one car is left running on the track.

Supporting up to 16 players over an IPX network (unusual for its time, as it's a DOS game), fiendishly difficult to the end, the game didn't catch on as most computers of the time struggled with the graphics (unless you had one of them newfangled 3dfx Voodoo cards that came with a 3d accelerated version). A decent Pentium was needed to play the game with SVGA graphics and all the graphics options turned on.

A couple additional notes: The majority of the examples below refer to the unpatched v1.0 Fatal Racing. A patch for Fatal Racing was made, and the US version, Whiplash, uses this "2.0 patch," which fixes a few bugs and changes a couple of options.

Tropes used in Fatal Racing include:

• Artificial Stupidity: Hey, this guy is going the wrong way?!
  • Oh, he knows. He wants to get intimate with your car's grill.
  • He does it on purpose. Each team has two cars in the race, and once the second driver is too far behind (mostly on longer/harder races) he tends to do this in order to mess up other teams and advance their lead driver. You can see him coming on the minimap, but if you're not in an agile car or you're already damaged and a sitting duck...
  • The artificial stupidity comes into play when the driver approaches a jump or corkscrew from the wrong side. They weren't programmed to stop.
  • Fatality: Million Plus car 8. Killer: Million Plus car 7. It's always the Million Plus team that has these things happen to them.
• Artistic License Physics: Damage from landing can be decreased quite a bit by slamming on the brakes until the engine shuts off. The downside is that the engine must be turned on when you land. Surprisingly, the AI never figures this out, leading to more than a handful of otherwise-unavoidable suicides on Bonus Race 3.
• Badass Driver: Winning a championship counts.
• Car Fu: Natch.
  • '"FATALITY! <Name of victim>"
  • '"Hey, you got one!" ~The announcer'
• Captain Obvious: The announcer at the splash screen before each race with DR DEATH enabled.
  • '"It's Whiplash!!!"'
  • '"It's FATAL RACING!!!"'
• Coming in Hot: Figuratively in that a car heading for the pit lane is usually spitting flames and smoke. Literally in that you have to slow down a car going 300 kph to a dead stop in a pit lane that is about five cars long. And don't even think of slowing down early, you'll just get rear ended despite the best efforts of the drivers behind you by drivers swerving off the racing line just to do that to you.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Acceleration stats mean nothing to the computer. Same for braking. Oh, and they can see you perfectly coming off of that loop.
  • Acceleration is fudged, but top speed is scarily accurate. As in, you're going at full speed on a narrow stretch of road with no escape and there's that Reise Wagen slowly creeping up on you... With many tracks being essentially flat out, choosing a slower vehicle is a liability, not for those few measly kph but because it is slower at all.
• Drives Like Crazy: A requirement to be on the course.
  • The Zizin drivers seem to have an even harder time than the player keeping the slippery car on the road and away from track hazards.
• Dummied Out: The Death Drop track has a curious example of this. It's called "Death Drop". The manual warns you: "Mind that gap!". There is a large flat section full of warning signs. You drive over it and... nothing happens. The mystery is revealed when you unlock the Bonus Cup and discover a sliding trapdoor in the road on one of the tracks, a feature not seen on any of the regular tracks and for good reason: it is severely bugged.
  • The Fly By track is advertised as having two corkscrew jumps, but it only has one. There is a narrow stretch of track with no guardrails and a very wide end zone that looks suspiciously like the developers tested a corkscrew jump there, failed to make it work correctly and decided to simply flatten away the whole thing and call it a day.
• Easy Mode Mockery: Played straight with "girlie" difficulty's naming, but the actual implementation of it makes some courses impossible to get 1st place on (difficulty determines the number of laps, and on Girlie mode, only a handful of courses reach 4 laps).
• Every Car Is a Pinto: With bonus points coming from head-on collisions or knocking a critically damaged car into a wall!
  • With an Out of the Inferno moment for the car that wrecked it.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The jewel box art above is a spot-on summary of the game.
• Excuse Plot: The top eight car manufacturers annually hold a series of races. The winner enjoys a big boost in sales.
• Game Breaking Bug: Playing a championship on the Bonus Cup will invariably have screwed up championship tables by the time Bonus 3 finishes. Examples include racers appearing twice on the table, racers not appearing in subsequent tracks (because they're no longer on the championship tables), destroying every car on the grid so you're the only remaining car... yet you're still in 3rd place and either have a long time trial or you just kill yourself.
  • Not just limited to the Bonus Cup, apparently. Just triggered this upon total destruction on 1-2 Snake Pass doing the Zizin Challenge (see Self-Imposed Challenge below).
  • The Divide-By-Zero jump bug that exists in a couple levels has a chance of crashing the game. On one of them, the computer will happily trigger it.
• Harder Than Hard: Impossible and DR DEATH (the latter of which also locks the damage scale to where any track that has unavoidable damage cannot be won without using the pits)
  • That's the whole point of the DR DEATH cheat code. Instead of pitting when you're dying, you have to pit tactically to avoid crowds and dangerous levels of damage. It adds a tactical element.
  • DR DEATH also cranks up the AI's aggressiveness Up to Eleven.
    • Not only that, the cars also become fragile like never before. All that, complete with marathon-ish amount of laps you need to go through. Good luck!
• I Just Shot Marvin in the Face/Marvin Just Shot Me In The Face!!!: Marvin is the default name for one of the Mission Motors cars. Go ahead, I dare you to have a head-on collision with him. No? Don't worry, he'll oblige.
• It's a Wonderful Failure: Not winning a race will often result in the announcer giving you particular messages on your performance:
  • Top 5 places: "You just missed it!"
  • Lower places: "You've got to try harder!"/"You need more practice!"
    • The voice cheat gives a hilarious one that plays the trope for laughs: "RUBBISH RACER!" (in a cheery mood)
• Just a Stupid Accent: One of the cheat modes changes the Race Announcer's voice into an alternate version. When the alternate voice is active while navigating the Car Selection Menu, the standard female voice describing the cars with be substituted by the alternate voice, except that on some of the cars, it will speak English with the accent of the country of the car's origin:
  • Auto Ariel: French Accent
  • DeSilva: Italian Accent
  • Pulse Engineering: British Accent
  • Global: Native American Accent
  • Reise Wagon: German Accent
• Marathon Level: Bonus Race 3 takes about 30 minutes to finish on Impossible, assuming no crashes or flipovers. No other tracks approach this in length, even on Impossible, leading to suspicion of this being a bug. Incidentally, this remained unpatched, and appears even in the US version.
  • Putting this in perspective, the average time for the computers is around 55 seconds. The track has 10 laps on Girlie. That's upwards of 10 minutes on the easiest difficulty. And it's one of those levels where you take unavoidable damage due to completely random flippers that are about ten times as strong as any of the other flippers in the game.
  • Bonus Race 7 is a short, perfectly round circuit. Its sides are sloped, with springy walls that send you bouncing high into the air and most often to your doom (like most courses in the Bonus Cup). What makes this a Marathon Level is the complete lack of friction on the course that sends your car careening outward and into the wall. Oh, and did I mention that it's 50 laps long on Impossible? So much for those 11 second laps.
    • Though you can get around this issue by sticking to the cone-shaped center of the track, which isn't frictionless (ironic that it's sloped in the oppposite way of a banked curve). Just watch out for any out-of-control opponents that might knock you off.
  • Bonus Race 8 is equally long and it is also a bug. The track has another bug where if too many cars fall into the cycling trapdoor before turn 1, they get stuck upon respawning. So if you're up for an unfair race, you can just cruise around until everyone is stuck.
• My Car Hates Me: Bonus 4. Respawn after getting killed. Car stalls. A car cruising at 360 kmh crests the hill in your rearview mirror...
  • And of course performance loss on damage. You fall get pushed into a ravine, take damage, respawn at a dead stop in the middle of the road in a crippled car that barely manages to crawl up to 100 kph belching smoke and flames. The pit lane is half a lap away, the pack is closing in fast, and should any of them accidentally intentionally tap your car, you turn into a fireball and they get two points. You know that one car movie...?
• Nintendo Hard
  • Especially with the DR DEATH cheat code.
• No Fair Cheating: Subverted. The only time that certain cheat codes (or, specifically, Cheat Car effects) don't work right is when a specific cheat code is activated (specifically, DUEL)
  • If you activate the alternate Race Announcer's Voice using the appropriate cheat code, it hilariously lampshades cheating at the start of each race:

"On your marks; no cheating now; GO!!!"

• Not a Scratch on It: Averted and subverted. You're going to take damage, guaranteed. Pitstops of course fix you right up. And your car won't display any visible damage, but will emit gradually increasing quantities of smoke and fire until it suddenly explodes at 0 hit points.
• Pinball Projectile: Your car, after impacting one of those interesting slanted walls that ricochet you into the air and across the road into the opposite wall, which may or may not do the same thing. The normal tracks have only one short instance of this, but the Bonus Cup is practically made of it.
• Ramp Jump: Duh.
  • Including moving ramps. Most tracks feature those little speedbumps that slowly and mysteriously go up and down. Naturally one pair of those is located in the middle of a turn, on a track section suspended over a ravine with no guardrails.
• Rubber Band AI: Surprisingly averted. It is very possible to lap second place TWICE in a race. Conversely, if one of the AI pulls ahead of you, it can be incredibly difficult to catch up, in spite of watching the lead time ever so slowly close...
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Comes in the following varieties:
  • No Casualties Run (never be victim to a fatality, even your own)
  • Pitless Run (never receive pit work)
    • Determinator: Pitless Run on a 16-car race after entering DR DEATH as a name. This is much harder than it sounds, since on a good deal of the courses, you'll take damage just from driving down the course. Flat-out impossible on Bonus Race 3.
  • Try to win any of the Championships on Impossible or even DR DEATH difficulty with Zizin. Anyone who does this really should at least be commended for their awesome driving (or incredible luck).
    • To elaborate: The Zizin has excellent turning but zero grip; it drifts, and it drifts more than a drunk driver cutting cookies on ice.
  • (Technical) Pacifist Run: Never be a killer for anyone else's death.
  • Beating Bonus 4 with the DeSilva]].
    • To elaborate: The level is basically a giant straightaway that wraps around so cars drive upside down for half of the track. The main hazard is that it is very difficult to avoid accidental intentional collisions by other cars and the pit lane is in the middle of the road. The DeSilva is the slowest car in the game, giving the opponents plenty of opportunity to slam into your rear bumper.
• Shout-Out: Well, the default drivers' names have |loads of these.
• Spiteful AI: Frequently, cars will do a 180 and run tracks backwards with the deliberate intent to take out any car on the grid. This frequently includes you.
  • They'll take out their own partners, especially if their partner is you. You can sometimes force them back in the right direction using the macro message keys (F6 - F8), but chances are they'll acknowledge and ignore.
  • Sometimes they chicken out and turn back, sometimes they drive the wrong way until the bitter end. There is a potential for schadenfreude in the fact that they don't stop for jumps that are impossible to clear in reverse.
  • Some will also race through the pit lane (which is out of the way and usually longer than the regular track) at full speed, aiming for anyone that is recovering health (which requires you to stay motionlessly for extended periods of time in a pit lane).
    • Mitigate this by parking backwards in the pit lane or facing a wall. It's not perfect (you'll have to stop AGAIN to recover the damage), but it decreases the damage taken.
• Writers Cannot Do Math: The conversions between MPH and KMH are wrong. For example, if you play as Global, the max speed in MPH is 197 miles per hour (198 on split-screen two player, for whatever reason). In KMH, you top out at 379/380 km an hour. That should be 237.5 MPH, not 197. Or, 315 KMH if 197 MPH is the base speed of choice.