As featured in Retrogaming Times Monthly issue #60, May 2009.

After many years of searching I have finally acquired the entire Tomy Tutor USA cartridge library - a whopping ten titles.  Upon receiving the seven games I had been missing over the past twenty years, I sat down and played through them alphabetically.  Car-Azy Racer was at the top of that list, a game unique among a unique hardware platform.  Car-Azy Racer is the lone educational entertainment, commonly shortened into the term edutainment, title on the system.  This is quite odd considering that in the USA the Tomy Tutor was marketed as a computer for kids, a computer that required no parental guidance and was designed to foster a child's introduction into the world of computing.  It was also the lone cartridge to be released that does not use the Tomy Joystick or Tomy Joy Controllers, opting instead for keyboard input.  Additionally it is the only released Tomy Tutor cartridge that did not have a Japanese counterpart as it was programmed by Wordwright, making it a USA production through and through.

Car-Azy Racer's main goal is to reach the end of your journey before nightfall.  Although there are various screens, the basic layout remains the same.  A window of text at the bottom of each screen explains the situation as well as the current question.  The questions are comprised of fourth and fifth grade level math and grammar, related to three main stops on your journey: the Gas Station, the Stadium and finally the Pizza Parlor.  Between each destination you are behind the wheel, your score displayed on the odometer.  The first question you are asked is which level you would like to play, represented as either first, second or third gear.  Honestly I don't understand how the gears relate to the difficulty since third gear seems to give the easiest questions and second gear seems to provide the most complex.  Regardless of the level decided upon, the journey begins, guided by the ever present little black bird.  Why a little crow hangs out with you the entire time is beyond my understanding, possibly because the developer didn't have a spare blue color in the palette.  Either way on the box for this game the bird is clearly shown as a crow.  During the behind the wheel portions of the game the player may be asked to press a randomly chosen key on the keyboard to abruptly stop the car.  The faster the player reacts, the more points they will earn.

Right from the start of the journey you are told to get your pencil and paper ready.  In other words this game is designed to be used in conjunction with a writing utensil and a sheet of scratch paper.  The first destination is the Gas Station, since there's no better way to begin a long journey than on a full tank.  The Gas Station problems have to do with reading sales totals, answering which number is in what position and other simple math questions.  It is here that a problem with how the game reads input first becomes apparent.  For instance if you are asked to input what number is in the tens place on the gas pump, you can enter pretty much anything, including letters.  The game is only looking for the one specific correct answer.  Additionally until a correct answer is inputted the game will not proceed.  I can see how this would be disheartening for a child unable to figure out the correct response.  I suppose that this is better than the program getting an unexpected response and crashing with an "ERR IN LINE 3460" message or something similar.  However this really makes me feel that the entire program was written in Tomy's version of BASIC.  The faster your correct response, the more points you earn.

After filling up your tank it's time to head back out onto the road and to the Stadium.  The games in the Stadium have to do with grammar and spelling but are handled in the same manner as the games at the Gas Station.  Multiple choice questions appear here as well but as before the program will take any input until the correct answer is entered.  At the very least with the multiple choice questions you can eventually move on due to the process of elimination.  After another brief moment on the road you pull into the Pizza Parlor where the difficulty setting seems to go out the window.  For the most part these are word problems that have to deal with percentages and fractions.  What I found most strange is that under the medium and hardest difficulty settings you'll get questions like, "If you have two friends with you and you all want equal amounts of pizza, how many slices would each of you get?"  Super easy stuff most four year olds could figure out.  However on the easier difficulty setting you get crazy questions about figuring sales tax on mixed amounts.  As with the other areas the game will not proceed until you input the correct answer.  For every question that is correctly answered you take a sip of your drink.  After answering all the questions you head back out on the road for your final debriefing, earning an additional 1,000 points for completing the "race" before nightfall.  After that the game goes right back to the introductory screen - no high score table, no fanfare, no anything.

Although the questions change between each play and there are three levels of difficulty, there really isn't much replay value here.  It almost makes me think that the "press this key to stop the car!" parts were thrown in at the last moment to attempt to add a little bit of randomization to spice up the game.  Oddly enough this game is exceptionally rare as Tomy Tutor cartridges go.  One would think it would be more common considering that it is the only educational game on an educational computer but this is far from the case.  There really just isn't enough here for a standalone game, especially to warrant a $40 purchase in 1982.  Perhaps if this was one of a series of games on the same cartridge, similar to how many games such as this were on the Apple II, I could see it being a worthwhile purchase.  However as it stands now, unless you're going for a complete set of cartridges, there is little reason to own Car-Azy Racer.
 

"InsaneDavid" also runs a slowly growing gaming site at http://www.classicplastic.net/dvgi

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