Amiga vs. Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge (Amiga)

Recently coming from the 8-bit racing games it is somewhat impossible not to be impressed by the high speed, detailed graphics and great sounding everything.

I just felt I had to cover the entire bunch of racers for the Master System in recent years, nothing more to it.

Somewhat disappointed by a vast majority of the offerings, not necessarily bad but seldom truly great, the genre obviously did more than well with added horsepower.

Thing is, few games reinvented the wheel (pun certainly intended) and what it all came down to felt like a slight difference in presentation and balancing of the experience concerning difficulty and the ability to steer ones conditions to win in one way or another (oh, the puns).

Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge does not really do that much to change this, in fact it is more of a return to the roots experience, but considering the fantastic presentation and being able to use the official license aquired by Gremlin it is not that much of a problem.

It never fiddles around with different cars, upgrades or anything of the sort.

One or two players, always on a horizontally split screen (a truly big deal at the time, even though the decision to use not much more than one third of the screen in PAL for the playing area even in one player mode can be questioned), with a faster acceleration and higher top speed if using manual transmission (and slower and lower dito if using automatic) racing for the top spot through a series of tracks (seven on easy, ten on normal and fifteen on hard).

What one have to bother about is placing ten or higher out of the twenty racers, otherwise a Game Over will show up on the screen (with two players racing only one have to place ten or higher for both to be able to keep competing), enter the pit stop if fuel is starting to run low and avoiding other racers and obstacles on the tracks.

But, like mentioned earlier, what truly made a difference is the presentation.

As a two man project, Shaun Southern as a coder and musician and Andrew Morris as a graphician, Magnetic Fields truly blew the competition away in 1990 with Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge.

From the attract screens showing of the Lotus Esprit in detail, booth in looks and from a technical perspective, to the car stereo used to chose one out of four available music tracks if the sound effects did not seem enough, the Super Scaler looking objects passing by on, and outside of, the tracks and the great feel of the controls making sharp turns in high speed a pleasant thing to tackle.

To make the experience a more dynamic one the tracks really differ both in design and visual appearance.

Some rather straight, some curved as hell, some with stones and signs to avoid crashing into and some with pools of water that slow things down or oil that throws things out of control for a short while.

And, of course, sometimes you have to drive through the night, through snow or annoyingly through patches of road work.

Now, this would be all good and fine if it were not for one fatal flaw: The artificial intelligence of the computer controlled racers. Or, rather, lack of that very thing.

See, Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge seem to love to up the challenge by making the road narrow in one way or another. This would not have been such a big deal if you had a honest chance of passing by the opponents or simply could slow down to avoid a close encounter which pushes you to the side dealing a quite huge blow to your speed.

But you do not. You can not.

Why?

Because the opponents do nothing more than bounce around on the track, horizontally, like ping pong balls in various speeds.

Once seen it simply cannot be unseen.

So bothersome, to feel that it all comes down to luck on some of the harder stages if you manage to pass a narrow passage without having to deal with other cars, because the penalty of loosing speed is such a big thing.

On some tracks starting in the jumbo position, just bouncing into another ping pong ball acting car when trying to get ahead of the competition during the first few seconds of a race can be enough to make it almost impossible to take back what is lost.

So much that you almost feel like trying to get into, say, tenth position on the previous track just to have a fair chance of managing the next (since you will have a starting position which is the previous goal passing one inverted).

Another thing worth noting is that the opponents does not seem to care about your car at all. They just keep swinging from one side to the other, driving pretty much straight trough you if your speed do not match theirs, pushing you to the side loosing speed while not being affected themselves.

It just seem so unfair, fury inducing to such an extent that it feels attractive to smash the controller into pieces, and takes away so much of the fun in playing the game.

At one point or another, it just seems to fall into place.

The flow of it all.

When this happens Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge really lives up to its reputation as one of the greatest racers on the system.

But most of the time some tracks in all of the three different difficulty setting brings everything to a halt in ways that many earlier games in the genre did not.

At least not in ways feeling as unfair as they do here.

Looking at the successor things apparently got a lot better, and I can not in any way claim Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge not being a game changer, but as a game concerned the wonderful presentation have passed the test of time far better than the actual balance of the gameplay.

It is good, but flawed and thus not great.