Wacky Races

Overview

Wacky Races (JP: Chiki Chiki Machine Mou Race) is a platformer developed and published by Atlus Co. for the NES platform. Based on the Hanna-Barbera racing parody cartoon of the same name, the game has the player control Muttley the dog as he attempts to rescue Dick Dastardly from his most recent predicament. The game has three scenarios - Hip Hop, Splish Splash, and Go Go America - and each has a different Dick Dastardly bungle to fix. The scenarios can be played in any order, though they're labelled A, B, and C in ascending order of difficulty.

Gameplay

Wacky Races features a standard control scheme for 2D platformers. Muttley can jump and also attack with his bite, though the bite has a short range. He can collect three types of items: gems, which award an extra life after 100 are found; 1-Up, which immediately awards Muttley an extra life; and bones, which add one notch to Muttley's power-up bar.

The currently active item on the power-up bar can be consumed by pressing the Select button. These power-ups include a bomb, which replaces Muttley's bite with thrown bombs which have greater range but an arc that's often hard to judge; a bark, which is worse than Muttley's bite as it spans the length of the screen; a tail-spin, which allows Muttley to glide slowly to the ground while the jump button is repeatedly tapped; and a heart, which adds one extra heart to Muttley's health meter (for a maximum of six) and also replenishes all hearts too.