Full Throttle 2

Your Sinclair

Overall 75%

Jon Pillar 75%

BARGAIN BASEMENT It's damp and it's dark But it's always quite merry When you're locked down the cellar With PILLAR & PELLEY! FULL THROTTLE 2 Zeppelin Games £2.99 Reviewer: Jon Pillar From the author of issue 63's Reader Covergame Earth Shaker comes the sequel to a game so old that when it was originally released, Rich's flares were in fashion the first time round. A motorbike racer, FT2 challenges you to qualify against 39 other riders on 8 famous circuits from Donnington to Sweden. These are modelled using the 'Gravity Variation System' to ensure authenticity, and what this means is that if you roar off the starting grid at 200mph (as I'm inclined to do) you'll go screaming off the track at the first bend, since this is what would happen in real life. Control is the name of the game here, the ability to know when to pour on the speed, and when to, um, pour it off. (You need to be a cross between those riders in the 1970s safety commercials bloke from Star Hawk!) Manage to finish in the first 30 and you progress to the next track, with the qualifying position upped by 5. And so on. All this is good fun, with small graphics and typically fast 3D scrolling, but does seem overly harsh on bad riders (like me). If you collide with another bike, you slowly decelerate to a dead stop - by which time all the bikes you've overtaken have zoomed past, and you're last again. It's this frustrating penalty that stops FT2 hitting the high notes, but overall it's a debut which earns Mr Batty a hearty hurrah. HURRAH!

On yer bike, Elvis, and let's burn some rubber! (The Surbiton Savages trundle off into the country for a leisurely Sunday afternoon ride.)

Crash

Overall 40%

Nick Roberts 40%

Zeppelin Games £2.99 Seven years after the original Full Throttle comes its sequel, cunningly titled Full Throttle 2! You take control of a rotary-engined 750cc Superbike and have eight international circuits to spin around in the Riders' Challenge. Sadly, the original game was a tad more playable than this. Of course, Full Throttle 2 is graphically superior, with it's colour scrolling backgrounds and title screens, but when you scrape another bike you go right down to zero mph before you can start off again. Hurumph! You have to come 30th out of forty on the first track, 20th on the second and so on. I found this almost impossible and could only stand playing a few games before I was kicking Mark Caswell in rage (any excuse, eh Nick?! - Ed)? But, no matter how well you play, the other riders always seem to do better. They never fall off and can ride straight through you from behind! Full Throttle 2 is an average bike simulation, and no better than the first.

As the sun sets over Belgium the race continues in Full Throttle 2.