XP Arcade: Rally 2011 LED Storm

A futuristic racer from Capcom's past that separates itself from the pack with some unique mechanics.

This column is “XP Arcade,” in which I’ll focus on a game from the arcades, or one that is clearly inspired by arcade titles, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Rally 2011 LED Storm is a game of many names. In Japan, it’s known as Mad Gear. In its various home computer ports — Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum — it was known as LED Storm. That acronym, by the way, stands for “Laser Enhanced Destruction,” because this was the late-80s. There are also two arcade versions with different names: the first is Mad Gear/LED Storm, while the other is is as different as its name, Rally 2011 LED Storm. Except for when it was referred to as LED Storm Rally 2011 instead.

Got all of that? It makes searching for information for this game exceptionally annoying, and requires checking again and again to make sure that the correct name is being used whenever it’s mentioned. At least the two arcade versions are fairly different, so knowing which is referenced is easy: LED Storm had a vehicle select and was less futuristic in its car design, while the other version, Rally 2011 LED Storm, limited you to one vehicle, but let you strategically change it into a motorcycle mid-race whenever you felt like it was necessary. That’s the version we’re looking at, as it’s the one Capcom included in their 2022 compilation virtual arcade, Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium.

The Capcom Arcade Stadium series has the usual hits you’d expect — lots of Street Fighters, Final Fight, some of Capcom’s most notable shoot ‘em ups developed in-house or by third parties — but part of the real appeal for me is in the games I’ve either never heard of or have, at the least, never had the chance to play before. Rally 2011 LED Storm, as an arcade title that released while I was a toddler and was ported to a bunch of home computers with a European footprint, fits into both camps. It was developed by much of the same team that worked on Final Fight, which even pulled the name of the enemy gang from the Japanese title of the racer.

LED Storm is a racing game, but it’s got a bunch of vehicular combat in it, too. No guns or anything like that a la RoadBlasters, but you’re going to be doing a lot of bumping and jumping. (No wonder Capcom couldn’t settle on a name here, as the perfect moniker was already taken.) The setup is that a couple of buddies wager a bunch of money against each other for a nine-stage race, winner take all, and then they drive over extremely dangerous, often broken roads, weaving in and out of traffic, avoiding oil spills, hoping to avoid running out of “energy” — hey, these are futuristic cars from 2011, they don’t use gas — and transforming from a car into a motorcycle as needed. Finishing a stage is merely a checkpoint that refills your energy, and you can explode or fall into the abyss as many times as you… want to, I guess? So long as you still have energy remaining on the meter, you can try to reach the finish line. You’ll receive fewer bonus points the longer it takes you, though: first place gets 100,000 points just for placing there, and you also get a tidy little multiplier bonus for your remaining energy at the end of a stage.

Like in OutRun, you score points just by driving: if you’re moving, you’re scoring. You also score points by destroying other vehicles — which you do by jumping and then landing on top of them — or by collecting the bonus point “P” icons that occasionally float down onto the screen. You don’t score a ton of points for knocking your rival aside, but you do slow them down, and finishing ahead of them is good for some points. Points are going to happen just by racing fast and finishing quickly, so what you probably want to focus on more than picking up those P icons or destroying every car in your path is surviving. Surviving longer on its own means more points! And to survive, you can’t run out of energy.

You’ll find “E” icons all over the course, sometimes floating from above like the Ps, and regularly just strewn across the course itself waiting for you to run over them. These are different than the gas tanks you can pick up, which, when collected, spell out the word energy in the bottom left of your screen. That’s a reserve tank, for if you do happen to run out of energy and your car is about to completely stop, ending your race and game. They’re often put in purposefully difficult to reach locations, or dangerous ones, but having a full reserve tank ready to go can save your game.

There’s one other pickup, and that’s a barrier — a “B” icon — that will shield your vehicle for a bit, keeping you from spinning out or outright exploding when damaged. Obviously, you’ll want to grab that when you can. The smaller vehicles you share the road with are annoying enough and can cause damage to you or set you off course, but the larger trucks take up most of the road, and will drive as if they’re trying to kill you. Capcom didn’t quite nail the replacement of fossil fuels and cars that transform into bikes part of the future, but they at least got the murder trucks right.

All of the stages you’ll race in are marked here: the map is mostly just used to show your progress, it doesn’t correspond to anything in the actual gameplay outside of hints about terrain.

You can’t defeat those huge trucks, by the way, just avoid them. And one of the best ways to do that is by switching from your larger car to a nimbler, smaller bike. The bike goes faster than the car and handles differently, too, but it also can’t take as much of a beating. So you don’t want to be using it in a place where you’re going to be ping ponged around, and it’s also slower when off-road driving in dirt or sand, which you’ll do in a few stages. Knowing when to switch between forms is what will help you get to the end as quickly as possible while also still have plenty of remaining energy, both for points and for the sanity of your robot friend. Oh, right: your car has an anboard computer named Mac, and he talks. Again, this was the late-80s.

Mac tells you if you’re doing a good job, or if you’re cutting it close. He also displays the map of the race and your progress on it to that point. The text Mac is speaking is full of errors and outright missing words in the written portions, but the voiceover has complete, error-free sentences, so at least you aren’t hearing nonsense. Other than it being an extremely 1980s idea of what a robot voice would sound like, I mean. This is more ‘80s Robot than HAL, that’s for sure.

The Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium edition of the game, as with every title in the collection, is loaded with additional modes. There’s your basic free-for-all where continues are allowed, you can save and load your game state, and you can rewind at any time. You can also change some options, like difficulty, game speed, or even turn on invincibility. The array of display options — scanlines or no, borders, resolution are there as well.

Sure, not receiving an energy bonus means you didn’t have any leftover energy, but seeing this screen means you lived, anyway.

To make it to an online leaderboard, though, you’ll need to play one of the challenge modes. The Score Challenge, which requires a minimum of 700,00 points to even log a score on the board, uses the base version of the game with no changes: once you get a game over, that’s it. The Time Challenge just measures how long it takes you to complete the game — the best on the board take around 15-16 minutes to do that as of this writing. And the Special Challenges, of which there are three, task you with competing in different ways. The first cranks the difficulty to max, and allows for no assist features at all. The second sets the game to its fastest setting, and once again shuts off every option. The last Special Challenge does let you rewind and turn up the game speed, but it measures how long it takes you to complete a run: so, rewinding can save you from dying, but it also adds time to your total.

Rally 2011 LED Storm is kind of basic in some ways, but it’s that simplicity that makes it engaging and difficult to put down. The depth of the game, and what keeps you going, is in figuring out the efficiency: what the best routes to take are, which vehicle form you should be using, trying to remember where the items you need the most are going to be, and when. It’s the kind of game that you’re better at every time you play it, and since it’s got a short runtime, you can keep on playing it again and again.

It’s worth noting, too, that not only is Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium available on Switch, Playstation 4, Xbox One, and Steam, but the games are pretty cheap. Rally 2011 LED Storm is all of $1.99 as an add-on for the Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium portal if you want to buy it separately. The bundled prices are even better, but they’re more of an upfront cost. It’s worth it, though: diving in for the whole thing is what brought me to Rally 2011 LED Storm in the first place.

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