The Video Game Critic

I think the Critic was a little harsh with the review of this, a D-. Certainly it has not aged well. But I remember after I first bought my Genesis I was enthralled with this game back in the early 90's. The first polygonal racer. At the time the graphics were very cutting edge and pretty amazing. Yes the frame rate is obv bad now. But at the time I was blown away. An arcade game on my home console! I'm playing it now and I still think it's fun and super challenging. That stunt track is crazy! It may be mostly nostalgia, but I still pop this in a few times a month to see how far I can get. Not too far as usual on the stunt track.

They actually had that ported to the GB, with a similar frame rate.

I have the lynx version of this, for me it does not hold up well lol

The review should at least mention the technical achievement of the arcade game.

A D- seems about right. Playing it today, with the slow framerate, is war on the mind.

I think it deserves at least a B, they were pretty decent for the time (pre-FX chip) and still pretty fun. I enjoy the old flat shaded/wireframe polygon games more than an average person though.

Keep in mind the Genesis (and Gameboy) had no GPU or coprocessor in those carts to handle the vector graphics -- they had to program the CPUs directly to process and display polygons, and then write a game engine on top of those routines. The fact that a 3d polygonal racer could work on such primitive platforms still blows me away. It's a pretty big technical achievement that they got it to work.

Yeah, but it's still not fun...

The review does mention that the game was a technical achievement:

This archaic racer is barely playable today, but it was pretty amazing for its time. Hard Drivin' was the first arcade game with first-person, 3D polygon graphics

On games like this and Journey to the Planets (http://videogamecritic.com/xefl.htm?e=77066#rev642) I take the "D" to meant dates; the games were fine back-in-the day, but most folk expect something different now.