I was justifiably nervous about RC Daredevil— it’s another eGames title. Fortunately, it appears to come from after their reformation period, when they started publishing games that A) worked; and B) were not bundled with spyware. I also spied the file VBRUN300.DLL (Visual Basic 3.0 runtime) on the CD-ROM and groaned.

Mercifully, the game works, did not infect my system, and may not even be written in VB. It’s also the most sophisticated flight game I have played since Pilotwings on the SNES. This game has the player flying one of 5 radio-controlled planes against computer-controlled radio-controlled planes in a variety of different competition modes, such as dogfighting, aerial racing, and paint balloon bombing campaigns.

Take a look at this screenshot:

It highlights two interesting details about the game. First is the kooky, jagged residential architecture. The second is the fact that every parking lot has handicap parking spaces. Very conscientious. The artists paid a lot of attention to details in this game. However, here’s one detail that they probably hoped no one would notice:

I only noticed these cardboard cutout trees because the game can be hard to get the hang of and I was trying to get back down closer to the earth.

On balance, RC Daredevil is a decent casual game, stipulating that I don’t expect much from eGames in the first place. There is nice visual detail, and I think the developer did a good job with the ambient sounds such as the faithful recreation of downtown traffic cacophony during the air race through the downtown skyscrapers. In fact, it’s the rare game that was good enough for me to start up and play again even after I had collected enough data for a MobyGames submission. That said, it’s still a casual game that won’t keep you entertained for very long after the novelty of all 4 game modes wears off.