An Afternoon on the Autobahn….How to Play the Game
I discovered Autobahn on September 1, 2004 and was immediately impressed by the graphics to this game. This is much more than the traditional simple version that you often see on the internet. This game, with its realistic vehicles, and highway situations, is clearly designed with realism in mind…at least up to a point anyway. The only difference between gaming and reality is the fact that in real life when you smash up a car, you really smash it up, but in Autobahn, while you can crash cars and stuff like that, those cars remain unscathed.
As you can see in the above photograph, while the vehicles really do smash each other, they don’t crumple, or break glass or otherwise show damage. The blue car on the hill is the racing car that I was driving. The racing car will show damage but only on the screen itself, the graphic of the car does not display the damage.
This game in near-photo realism, can be played in a number of ways, including racing with another car, but watch out if you do that because the computer’s race car will do absolutely anything to get ahead of you, including smashing into you in order to incapacitate your car. The other race car will not get smashed in these crashes and can continue on indefinitely, while your vehicle starts out at 100% mint, and can only go downward from there.
At 40% your car will begin to smoke, making it impossible to see anything unless you are traveling at high speed which causes the smoke to billow out behind you just as it would in real life. Although the object of the game is to get from one end of the highway to your exit, so many meters down the road, it is virtually impossible to get all the way through the race with a mint vehicle. The reason for this is simple: The game is programmed against you. The other cars on the Autobahn, the ones not involved in the racing itself, will attempt to block your path, or even pull out in front of you in order to cut you off.
It is possible to play this game entirely by yourself, without a computer operated car to race against you. These are called, “time trials” and they are designed to see just how fast you can really go. With a vehicle capable of speeds up to and even exceeding 160 miles per hour, you can certainly get to your destination quickly, but don’t expect to do so without some trouble getting in your way. The road is full of twists, turns, underpasses, exits and dozens of other vehicles which are all attempting to get in your way.
The very nature of the game makes it difficult to resist, especially since there are various “wrong” ways to play it. My personal favorite mode of play is to deliberately stop my car just short of an underpass in order to cause a thirty car pile-up in front of it. If you stop, they stop, but they are not going to be friendly about it. What I like to do next is sneak up behind the last car in the pile and tip-toe my way through the underpass, just inching along, until there is an opening that I can scoot through, in order to get further ahead.
Once in the stopped position, the other cars will do just about anything to cut you off and damage your car, including ramming you in slow motion, ramming other cars to make them slide sideways into you, and stopping dead in front of you so that some other car can creep up behind you, blocking you in and preventing your escape so they can make short work of you. The trick is to avoid this at any cost. That’s the hard part, which is why I say that it is virtually impossible to get entirely through a race with a perfect vehicle. Even when simply running the race without deliberately stopping you will get more than your share of difficulties which will prevent you from exiting the race with a perfect car.
The longer the race, the more likely you are to either not get all the way through it, or to get through it with a badly damaged vehicle. Each race is different, not only in length, design and amount of vehicles, but also in time of day and weather conditions. You can drive your race in the middle of the night with a starry sky overhead, or in broad daylight with the sun in your eyes, and just about any hour of the day in between as well. You can drive in the dark, in the rain, on a cloudy day, or on a perfect sunlit afternoon.
