the inferior sequel to the spectacular video game Interstate ’76. Got ’em off the install disc. Great concept art, not a great game.
Interstate ’76 came out in 1997, alternate history ’76, Mechwarrior 2 engine, great story, great characters, great car physics, it’s got a poetry button, you can shoot a pistol out the window of your car in first person, great voicework, great multiplayer, incredible funk soundtrack performed by a one-off band called Bullmark – composed, apparently, of the bassist from Third Eye Blind, the drummer from Primus, Santana’s keyboardist and some other folks. Some of this info is from this ten year old blog.
Interstate ‘82 was a weird disappointment, chucking the aspects of ’76 that had been most praised. It lost the ‘70s atmosphere and didn’t replace it with a particularly ‘80s one. The soundtrack is licensed new-wave. The first game’s characters had a mantra “never get out of the car” on account of that’s always how you get killed; the sequel makes a feature of how you can get out of the car now. Interstate never closes its eyes anymore when it kisses your lips, basically.
But it’s still got a poetry button, and it’s still pretty fun, and a lot of the same folks worked on it as the first one, and this concept art is super cool. So probably it’s just the devs making the most of a lousy publishing situation, such that their great idea for a Blues Brothers mall chase level ends up looking like this:
Hot scoop: a lot of the dialogue sounds stilted and cut-off in places, which turns out to be because it was messily edited for profanity, mostly cutting words out, occasionally swapping “motherfucker” for “motorsucker”. They left the original wavs in, though, so you can uncensor it just by renaming a bunch of files.
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