Wii Rally

I was contacted sometime ago by reader named Rustopher Hashonah a.k.a Rocket Man, you may have seen his comments around the site. He originally proposed a Remake of his favorite title Rocket Jockey, so I told him to go ahead a write up a “Wii Wish”. Needless to say he was so amped at the opportunity to share his love for what he calls a “hidden gem” that I received his “Wii Wish” within a couple days so without further ado I present…..

Rustopher Hashonah’s Wii Wish: Rocket Jockey

Whenever I see reminiscence about fun, yet somewhat dated PC games, the same group of popular gems like X-COM, Fallout, Star Control II, and Syndicate get the most attention. During these conversations, I always bring up a small lost gem, but very few have heard of it and even fewer have played it. This diamond in the rough is known as Rocket Science’s “Rocket Jockey”.

Published by SegaSoft back in 1997, Rocket Jockey lived a short life between being too powerful for some machines and yet incompatible with next generation PCs. In addition, the coveted LAN play-enabling patch was released far too late in the games lifespan, after any popularity Rocket Jockey had built faded away. Rumour had it the game would be released for the Playstation, but this never came to fruition.

Rocket Jockey is a game about a future sport; rocket… jockeying. As a Rocket Jockey, you straddle a rocket and ride it around a gladiatorial style arena at high speeds. Armed with a grapple on either side to steer, you can enter any of three modes of play:

1) Rocket Racing: speed around an obstacle course to be the fastest
competitor (or solo for a time trial).

2) Rocket Ball: a polo-style sport involving snagging balls with the
grapple and whipping them appropriately into goals before your
opponents can stop you or score more.

3) Rocket War: a gladiatorial battle against other competitors which
involves ramming other rockets, snagging jockeys off their mounts with
the grapple, tying various items (jockeys, rockets, poles, bombs) to
other items (jockeys, rockets, poles, bombs) for style points.

Simplistic as they sound, this was an incredible and intuitive game, pure unadulterated genius. Besides the addictive game-play (oh, the screams of a competitor jockey ripped from his rocket and swung into a pole), what also stood out with Rocket Jockey was the classy style; down-home 1950’s Americana sensibilities reminiscent of Interplay’s
Fallout series combined with snarky, nihilistic future ad designs. And the music. Oh, the music. The game was accompanied by a surf guitar soundtrack from none other than Dick Dale himself.

No game I know of has even come close to being anything like Rocket Jockey (Jet Moto?). And that’s the clincher; it would be so simple to recreate today. To not give this game a proper revival would be a crime. And that’s where the Wii comes in. The controls are a near-perfect match.

The rocket is controlled by leaning; left or right and you drift in that direction. Up or down were the same, though there wasn’t much of a height radius (rockets only went, at most, ten feet from the ground, just enough to ram an opponent off his/her rocket). This basic guidance could be controlled with the WiiMote, with emphasis based on increasing the angle the WiiMote is titled. Being a PC game, speed and launching and releasing the grapples (left and right) were all keyboard based.
Velocity (speed, braking) could be handled with A and B, and the Nunchuk could conform to a nice grapple. Aiming was originally
nonexistent; it was based on the rocket’s angle of lean. With a slight adjustment an aim factor could be a variable handled by the
analog stick.

This game was way too short lived and was so good it cries to be remade for the modern day. Fan attempts have been made to bring it to Unreal Tournament and other platforms. In a recent attempt to get in touch with one of the former developers, I was informed that lawyers constantly botched earlier attempts to get this game properly licensed for a remake. With my prodding, said contact did put forth the idea of porting or re-developing Rocket Jockey to the few remaining Rocket Science alumni. So far, nothing yet has come of this. If anyone out there can do anything for this game, I implore you to try. With the additional promise of online multi-player (or at least split-screen local), an update of Rocket Jockey has the potential to be a future
solid gold hit.

Wii Rally’s Comments
I think there is definite potential for such a game to be a success but I think the game would have to go a bit deeper than simply flying around an arena. Perhaps if courses were implemented like ExciteTruck or interplanetary travel like we should see in the upcoming Super Mario Galaxy.

I’d like to thank Rustopher Hashonah for his wish I hope you all enjoyed reading it. If you have you own “Wii Wish” I’d love to see it and who knows your wish maybe featured on Wii Rally.