Raft Rider Review

I don’t think I’ve ever officially stated it, but I just love third-party games no one would have dared release unless they were insane. Nintendo tried to combat this problem with their infamous lock-out chip, and pretty much succeeded. There was a reason they did it, and that’s because one of the causes of the fatal crash of 1984 were companies like U.S. Games. U.S. Games, like many odd third-party underdogs, was of the breed known colloquially as ‘mutt’, spawned as a subsidiary of Quaker Oats (seriously). They released several strange games for the Atari 2600, a number of which aren’t that bad, and Raft Rider fits right up there with the best, er worst of them. It only counts as the best if you like your games like you like your steak, purchased from a man in a back alley.

Graphically, you can’t help but feel that the artistry of the programmers here was a little under the weather, shall we say, or perhaps under the bottle. Your raft riding hillbilly looks pretty good, though more stiff than a first-time hooker, but the moose is a huge block that you wouldn’t be able to really make out unless you read the manual. Overall, Raft Rider looks like a guy riding a raft on a river avoiding various objects and wondering why the same dang beaver keeps running across the screen to fell trees in his way. It just feels underdone or completed at the hands of the inexperienced, which the rest of the game seems to prove.

After the horridly indistinct opening song, Raft Rider greets you with pretty much nothing in the sound department. If you die you get a little blip track, but the majority is incidental effects. A falling tree here, what’s supposed to be a moose call there (not a bad approximation for the system, really), and you have the extent of it. The attempt to create the sound of running water doesn’t work out too well, sounding more like someone ruffling a sheet. But the sound sparsity does something to you in this one…

Raft Rider involves, wait, guess it, guessssss itttt, riding a raft. While riding, you have to avoid things. Other than an occasional gold nugget, three of which nab you an extra life, there’s nothing else. And picking up the nuggets takes some incredible skill. Raft Rider has one big problem; it’s about as easy to control as an indy car on ice. Until you realize that tapping quickly to the left will immediately stop your movement, you spend a lot of time wondering how in the hell you’re supposed to be playing it. Your rider takes huges sweeps up or down, and if you don’t learn this critical movement, you’re finished in a few minutes, even on the easy setting. But, strangely, once you get it down Raft Rider has a tendency to grow on you like a cold that won’t go away. Unfortunately, the easy setting becomes too easy and becomes outright mind-numbing, but the advanced setting is quite a challenge for those of you who actually want to get experienced. The video below pretty much sums up everything:

Have to give Raft Rider’s mental ward programmers some credit, because who else could have come up with this idea? Unfortunately, it doesn’t entirely succeed due to the bizarre controls and lack of real difficulty, but it was definitely an interesting idea to attempt, almost as interesting as killing gophers with a shovel, which is another title by U.S. Games.

I have to say, I enjoyed Raft Rider a lot at first once I figured out how to play it, and even tried to use it to my advantage in an Atari tournament, because I figured no one else would be insane enough to play a perfect score. Even I couldn’t make it because it was taking too long, and much to my surprise there was someone out there who probably would have programmed it themselves. Raft Rider has a way of driving you to the kind of anger that forces you to figure it out, but once you do it kind of falters in the end. The advanced setting can be challenging, but due to the lack of real depth you start to get sick of it in about ten minutes. Considering it takes about two hours to get a perfect score, the length is there, literally, but trust me, you don’t want to go for it.

Raft Rider is a perfect example of the third-party developer curse that Nintendo was so fearful of, but at the same time it has a certain charm to it that you might find enjoyable at least for a few runs. After that, owning it is mainly a matter of collecting value, because it’s not entirely easy to find. But you have to be a completist to even want it. Guess what I am.