Unirally AKA Uniracers

DMA Design, most famous for their masterful puzzler – Lemmings, turned their hand to a quirky SNES game called Uniracers, also known as Unirally in PAL territories.

Uniracers starred a single-wheeled bike, whose animation had more personality than most human sprites.

The unicycle turned and looked behind if an opponent was close, beat its saddle against the ground in frustration when it lost and leaned into the wind when at top-speed.

It is one of the few side-on racing games that I can think of and it worked so well. Flying along a track with another bike hot on your trail, doing tricks the whole time to keep your speed up, watching out for the sticky mud and the one-way sections all at lightning speed was quite an experience.

One moment you were coasting along a nice, flat piece of track, the next you were launched into the air, without any concept of how far the drop was, you just had to try and fit as many tricks into that air as possible.

Another cool thing about Uniracers was the way the game used to rate your tricks. Pulling off a Treble Twist, with a Spin City and a Table-Top would earn you a comment from the game in flashing letters – “Whoa!”, “Uh uh”, “Killer” and others. It was oddly satisfying.

This leads me nicely onto my next point. The Half-Pipe was king. I’ve come across this in quite a few trick based games (1080 Snowboarding and Tony Hawk Skateboarding spring to mind), but when the game removes the racing aspect and just gives you virtually open-ended tricks to play with, it really comes into its own. Learning which tricks to slot where and for how many points was fun in itself.