The Race

Your Sinclair

Overall 83%

Marcus Berkmann 83%

BARGAIN BASEMENT Another delve into the recesses of Speccy softstuff with Dr Marcus "stand very still and try not to scream" Berkmann. THE RACE Players Premier £2.99 Reviewer: Marcus Berkmann You may know a bit about this one already - after all, we ran a playable demo of the first level on one of our Smash Tapes recently (March 1990 to be precise). It's a two-player vertically-scrolling racing game, something along the lines of Spy Hunter or the more recent Action Fighter, with the screen divided firmly into two halves, so the two cars don't interact at all as such. Drawn in metallic-look mononchrome, it's visually reminiscent of the Speccy Xenon more than anything else, and for a vertical scroller it's exceptionally easy on the eye - at no point do the little cars get lost in over-ambitious backgrounds, as is so often the case. It plays very well too, in a limited sort of way. There's no side-to-side movement of the play area, but the vertical scrolling is exceptionally fast and smooth, with the cars responding very sharply to the controls. What you have to do is simple in the extreme - complete each of the six courses in as short a time as possible. To do this you need to keep a beady eye on the arrows that mark out a suggested route (or else you'll end up smashing straight into solid wall) and also position your finger close by the turbo switch for that extra bit of boost you'll need when making a particularly long jump using one of the stunt ramps. Yep, it's just like a futuristic version of The Dukes Of Hazzard! If pure reaction games are your bag you could do a lot worse than pick this up - in fact, you might be planning to already. For the rest of you, why not check out that demo again for another quick look? It's really pretty good, you know.

Crash

Overall 41%

Nick Roberts 41%

BIG BUDGET BONANZA A veritable mini-flood of lo-price thrill packs to keep DJ Nicko from waggling his girl friend's ear and stuck to joystick wielding instead! Here we go... THE RACE Players Premier £2.99 Pit your wits against a friend, or race against the clock in The Race. You can pull at least eight 'G' in your gleaming performance car as you accelerate away from the starting grid, and prepare to fly into the air when you hit that ramp. The inlay boasts six massive race tracks, a dual player mode with player one and player two's tracks scrolling independently, and a thumping 'Sonic Graffiti'soundtrack for 128K owners. In reality it's simply another scrolling car race game along the lines of so many others. The graphics are slick and well defined, but then what graphics aren't these days? And the soundtrack is there - just! Unfortunately the whole thing's in monochrome, and cyan monochrome on level one at that. I just don't find car races playable any more. Each time a new version of this type comes out, it might just as well be the older games with new graphics and sound. This one isn't particularly playable either: the so called 'turbo' just puts the car out of control, and with the twists and turns you need to make to complete each of the races you would be a fool to use it. The Race has all the usual Players Premier refinements, but when the game is totally unoriginal is it really worth refining?