| | | Fun driving game where you pick from one of six or so drivers of different weight, guts, and car and wheel strengths, then rev your engines in a mad race to the finish line in a big Gran Prix multi-race extravaganza.
You start on standard city tracks, but later tracks, if I remember aright, get into trickier dirt and puddle type terrain. You won't see them unless you go for a longer Gran Prix, however; they go up to thirty races or so. The individual races vary between lap courses and end-to-end road races.
As you race, you get opportunities to improve your car body or tire strength. These become important as you play further into the tougher/longer races, where your car starts to wear out from constant cornering or collisions. If either of them gets too worn down, things will get tough for you, but you can get that fixed up in a jiff if you duck into the pit stop--although you'll lose some time in there, of course.
The AI actually tries to mess with you in this game, blocking you off or swerving into your car to knock you for a loop. Bastards! Making sure to grab the inside line gets really important, especially when someone else on the track has a car with a better top speed. Fortunately, arrow markers on the road make it pretty easy to see when a turn is coming, even without an overhead map of the course. If you get really lucky, or have great reflexes, you can grab a turbo boost powerup, and cruise past everyone--at least for a few seconds.
They came up with a nifty two-button system: one button is low gear, and the other high gear; optimum efficiency comes from timing your switch between the two if you've had to slow down enough to drop into first gear.
Even though all the cars look the same, and don't handle in what you would call a realistic fashion, I suppose, this little racer brings a lot of tension and strategy to the table. The graphics are simple, but handsome, and the action really does get rather nail-biting on the later courses. |
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| | | | Roadster has some kind of Vs mode, but I haven't tried it. |
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