Guts and glory game veering3/2/2024 ![]() It comes to a sorry pass when a game makes you just want to unplug your Amiga and dust off your old Scaletrix set. After Race Drivin''s promise of so many high- speed thrills and spills, I was just left with a load of bellyache. You don't need Race Drivin' if you've got Hard Drivin' and it's certainly not in the same league as Geoff Crammond's Formula One Grand Prix or Lotus Turbo Challenge 2. Race Drivin' is a totally unenjoyable game from start to finish. What use is a racing game if you can't tell how fast you are actually going? The stunt tracks could be reasonably exciting - if only you could control the car well enough to get round them. ![]() The game doesn't give any feeling of acceleration or speed - there's no real difference between driving at down the track at 50mph or 150mph. The jerky graphics and unresponsive controls make you spend as much time off the road as you are on it. Race Drivin' gives you the chance to link two Amigas and race head-to- head, but it's not enough to salvage what is essentially an atrocious driving game. Your confidence in the game takes more than a little bruising when you see the car explode into flames when it's nowhere near another object. The game has a reasonable range of options, including a choice of manual or automatic gear changes, but you'll have so many problems with the steering that you won't even start thinking about driving the manual cars.Īction replays of your crashes are shown, but they only serve to highlight the awful collision detection and pitiful graphics. The reason was that cars were so hard to control, that I was very tempted to get my Scaletrix out of the loft and get some real racing excitement. I had absolutely no fun on the stunt tracks in Race Drivin'. My favourite obstacles were the high-banked curves, but only because they reminded me of my old figure-of- eight Scaletrix circuit, and of the vast amounts of simple fun I used to have with a few sections of plastic track and a couple of plastic cars. The cars were so hard to control that I was tempted to get my Scaletrix out of the loft and get some real racing excitement If you can't change lanes without falling off the road, what hope have you got on the loop-the-loop? Driving on the stunt tracks is insufferable. They certainly should be exciting to drive on, with loop-the- loops and stunt bridges, but once again the spectre of uncontrollable cars and appalling graphics rears its ugly head. The stunt tracks look as though they've been designed by a guy who thought Spaghetti Junction was a good idea. After a couple of hours practice you can just about get the hang of steering on the speed track, so it's on to the stunt track with the promise of untold thrills and spills. It's impossible to control the car with any degree of accuracy - you can't even change lanes without spinning off the side of the road. You can choose between either using a mouse, which is an absolute nightmare, or using a joystick, which is just a very bad dream. Steering a high- performance car should be an absolute delight, but the controls in Race Drivin' are stodgy at best and dreadfully erratic at worst. And no, you haven't accidentally driven on to the stunt track. Just drive off the side of a bridge and you're suddenly transported to Glitchville Tennessee, where bridges don't exist and cars can seem to glide effortlessly through the air. The 3D system doesn't stand up to much punishment. But then again, you can cruise straight through some concrete pillars without even scratching a go-faster stripe. To add insult to injury, you sometimes crash into non- existent objects. Before you can react, you will either smash into the side of a building or crash into the car in front. If you think you've got room to overtake, what looks like a clear gap will invariably by swallowed in an instant by a single screen update. The buildings and other cars lurch horribly around the screen, giving you absolutely no chance to judge distances or spot which way the road is going to turn. ![]() The game's polygon graphics are pretty standard, but the 3D system is horrendously slow and jerky. The basic differences between them are handling and speed, but the control system and the graphics are so awful it doesn't really matter which on you drive. You get the chance to put the pedal to the metal in three high- performance cars - the Sportster, the Roadster and the Speedster. Race Drivin' has the original Hard Drivin' stunt and speed tracks, and two bonus tracks to push your boy-racer skills to the limit. ![]() Race Drivin' is the sequel to the popular - but unfortunately that's just about all it's got going for it. When a game is sold on the merits of its predecessor, you instinctively know something has to be wrong.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |