Superbike 98 PS1 Prototype Demo Review

Superbike 98 is an unreleased demo build of a motorbike racing game that was in the process of being built during the mid-stages of 1997 and early 1998, but due to different reasons and circumstances, the game never saw the light of day. 

But with this here there is early versions or alpha builds of the game that you can find now online that you can play at using emulators. Now this version of the game that i managed to find online, it is quite buggy and glitchy but although it does play, now there's no real sound effects there's no sound effects of the bike you can play on one track but it is relatively unfinished in terms of certain features like the gameplay can be quite choppy and there's a lot of like screen tear and even pop-ups that show up in the environment. 

But graphically for an early build of a game it was actually visually quite good and it would have been interesting to see what this game would have looked like had it been finalized and polished and had it been released into the mainstream.

I think it would have been quite decent as there are quite a number of bike racing games on the system but there are very few that are graphically really that good in my own opinion. They are playable and they're enjoyable but graphically they wouldn't be as good as some other type of games but this here showed a lot of promise. 

But what's it even like to play this demo build well honestly i was quite surprised with the handling physics of the bike having played loads of other bike games on the system this here control system on this game was relatively surprising. 

It was actually really good now it was a little bit sensitive but at the same time was very responsive and almost very accurate compared to other games that i've played over the years, this year would have been one of the better versions of the game to play and it's a pity that never saw the later day because i genuinely think that this would have been a decent game had it seen the light of day because it did have a lot to offer. 

It actually does have a lot to offer in terms of how it plays as it does play really well for a very early version of a game that never got to see the light of day it is quite impressive for what is on offer. 

Even though there's no sound but you can still play the entirety of this track in general now there's no limits on the amount of laps you can do, you have infinite laps you can drive around to your heart's content or you can even drive in reverse it totally is up to you how you play it but it's interesting to be able to get to play these unique demo builds. 

Now we are being able to get access to them online in different formats and you can now play them on emulators which is really cool and it's just really cool to see very early versions of games that were in development even though they never got to be released but at least now we can experience them just to see what they're like and we can make our own opinions on them now which is pretty cool and it is a pity that a lot of these games never saw the light of day because there is a lot of these early versions of games that had a lot of promise and that showed real potential and we'll always be left wondering what could have been. 

But that's the cool thing about old consoles and old games, you're always left with those questions even with early demo builds even when you consider one of the most important and probably one of the most asked-for prototypes was the Resident Evil 2 prototype, which is now called Resident Evil 1.5.

When you look at that compared to the Resident Evil 2 game that we got you can see how a lot of these prototypes defined genres and how they define various outcomes and when you've seen screenshots of them in magazines and even read articles about some of these prototypes which you would find in magazines it always left you with a lot of questions and what ifs and you could always make your own statements and make your own assumptions on these ideas and these concepts which was pretty cool. 

And even to this day going back to them it still leaves you with a lot of those unanswered questions but now we are getting the ability to be able to play them and experience them for ourselves so at least now it does tend to answer a lot of those questions that we had all those years ago so that in itself is worthwhile and is a worthy chance to experience them just for that alone so I highly recommend if you do get to play any of these prototypes you should definitely check them out if you can. 

So I'd love to know what your thoughts are of this demo build of Superbike 98 for the PlayStation. 

Did you know anything about it or did you even have any information regarding the game or any of its development back in the early days of the PlayStation? 

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this demo bill so be sure to share it down in the comments below and be sure to keep watching to see more content on other games similar to Superbike 98, you can check out the blog where we will be diving into the iconic elements of these classic video games and as always keep those gaming memories alive...