Mastertronic
£2.99

At last, a game that uses the new lightguns that everyone got at Christmas (didn't you?). Mastertronic are the first to produce lightgun games (to my knowledge) other than the ones you get with the gun. But they've played it safe by including a normal control method game on the B side of the tape.

You take part in a race across the US, dashing across such stages as 'California beach race' and 'New York City in sight', shooting opponents and jumping hills. Keep out of the water though as it slows the car down and you only have a set time limit.

American Turbo-King is yet another clone of Super Stuntman, a game from CodeMasters ages ago. The graphics are typically CodeMasters - hang on, it says Mastertronic on the inlay! CodeMasters did in fact produce the game along with Supersonic Software and Mastertronic have marketed it. All the sprites are in the small detailed vein used so much in budget games these days, and backgrounds are detailed too.

Control with the lightgun is a real joke. I always thought the idea of plugging a gun into your Spectrum was to play games such as duckshoot, not shooting direction indicators to change direction of a car! What you want here is a steering wheel and pedals. As to sound, it could be straight out of anything vaguely CodeMasters in the past year!

American Turbo-King holds nothing we haven't all seen before, and if you bought a CodeMasters car game in the past year or so don't bother with this, it's exactly the same.

Hey, don't I remember something just like this by the late lamented Ultimate Play The Game about a million years ago? Trans Am it was called. This new CodeMasters version bears more than a passing resemblance to the old Ultimate smasheroo, but this time of course you've got God, or at least a lightgun, on your side. You steer by shooting steering icons and change from forward to reverse by zapping the car itself.

There are five stages to the journey going from LA to NY, starting at the California Beach, then moving on to the Rocky Mountain Pass, the Grand Canyon Jump, past the Great Lakes Stage, and finally on to New York City In Sight. It's a sort of arcade road movie really. I dunno, I found it really hard to concentrate on steering the car without bumping into stuff let alone shooting as well. All along the route men with guns try to blow your bum off, and usually they succeed. Not as good as the original, but it probably rewards persistence.

BARGAIN BASEMENT

Another delve into the recesses of Speccy softstuff with Dr Marcus "stand very still and try not to scream" Berkmann.

Mastertronic
£1.99
Reviewer: Marcus Berkmann

Hello, what's this? There I am, drivelling on about how different, exciting and fun CodeMasters' Italian Super Car is and up pops a game almost exactly like it. American Turbo King - the location refers to the courses this time, not the cars - is very much the same kettle of fish and more than a mite whiffy, if you ask me. "Action! Action! Action" shouts the blurb, which is a slight exaggeration, as the game is both slower and less challenging than the Italian jobby. Here the control system is slightly different - left means that you go northwest rather than west, and you can't press two directions at once - but the game is very similar. Viewed from above, you drive through various terrains (California Beach Race, Rocky Mountain Pass and so on) in your turbo-charged , armour-plated supercar, which for some reason goes not a great deal faster than a C5. As in Italian Super Car, you have things firing at you, but the graphics are less impressive here, there's less colour, and it's all disconcertingly easy. I mean, if I can get to Stage Two on the first attempt, there's got to be something wrong. Ah, but you can use a Magnum Lightphaser™ if you happen to have one. Sadly I don't. Otherwise, a damp squib (glub glub).

THE COMPLETE YS GUIDE TO DRIVING GAMES

It's strange but true - normally courteous YS readers tend to turn into homicidal maniacs once they get behind the wheel of a Spectrum. We sent JONATHAN DAVIES, who still hasn't managed to get that wretched helmet off, to find out why.

It's an expensive business, driving. Not only do you have to hand out piles of dosh to actually get a car, but there are loads of 'hidden costs' thrown into the bargain' too. For a start, you've got to get it insured (in case you crash), which means serious sponds for your average Spectrum owner Then there's road tax, servicing, MOTs, petrol, all sorts of things. And, if you want to keep up with the latest fashions, you'll want to purchase a few 'extras' as well, ranging from simple '-TURBO-' stickers for the back window to alloys, buckets and twin cams. And they all mean spending lots and lots of money.

So wouldn't it be nice if you could get your Spectrum to sort of 'pretend' was a car, allowing you to zoom about to your heart's content for minimal outlay instead? Well, actually you can! Yes, all you need to do is buy a suitable driving game, load it up and you've got yourself a set of wheels.

It'll be almost exactly the same as driving a real car except that you can crash as much as you like without having to worry about your no-claims bonus. And you'll be able to choose from all the latest posh sports cars like Porsches, Ferraris and Lotuses and drive them as far and as fast as you like without having to splash out on a drop of petrol! (In fact, because driving games are so much cheaper and more practical than real cars, it is predicted that by the year 2012 the motorcar will have become obsolete, replaced by the driving game.) The only trouble with all this is that it's a bit hard to pick up birds with a 48K Spectrum.

JUST WHAT, EXACTLY, IS A DRIVING GAME?

Mmm, knew we'd have to get round to this sometime. Well, I've had a think and come up with the following spec...

- It's got to have either a car, a motorbike or a lorry in it.

- That means no bicycles, boats, jet-skis, tanks or anything like that.

- And no skateboards either. They're crap.

Seems simple enough. It means we're including Grand Prix-type games (where you just race against other cars) and shooting ones (where you zap them) but not similar-looking ones that don't have cars, bikes or lorries in (like boat ones). Okay? Phew. I never thought it would be quite so easy.

SO HOW ABOUT THINGS LIKE ARMY MOVES?

Oh cripes. Look, just shurrup. will you, whoever you are. No, Army Moves is out, I'm afraid. It's rubbish anyway.

So let's take a look at a few examples, eh? It's worth noting that, where driving games are concerned, the ratio of crap ones to good ones is a lot higher than with other types of game (apart from football games, of course). So you can't be too careful.

RATINGS

The YS Ratings System? You don't want that old thing. No sir, over here we have the brand-new top-of-the-range 1990 model. It's turbo-charged, fuel-injected, 16-valve, super-cooled and has a full X-pack (with droop snoot). And spots. You'll be doing yourself a favour.

DRIVE
It's no good having a driving game that seems to be simulating an FSO or something. You want real power, a feeling of being at one with the road and all that sort of thing. Control responses, speed etc are all taken into account here.

VISIBILITY
Assuming you remember to clean all the dead leaves and bird turds off the windscreen before you set out, what's the view like? A thinly-veiled graphics category, in other words, but jolly important all the same.

ROADHOLDING
It may seem to have everything, but once you've set off, and you've been on the road for a while, do you relish every second that you're behind the wheel? Or do you want to keep stopping at the services? Or perhaps you'd rather just take the bus instead, eh?

FIRST-OFF-AT-THE-LIGHTS FACTOR
A competitive edge is most important where driving's concerned, both in real life and on the Speccy. So do the other cars put up a decent fight, or do they just seem to be part of the scenery (if, indeed, there is any)?

DRIVING GAMES FOR THE BUDDING LADA-OWNER

As with all tried-and-tested formulae, driving games are big news in the world of the cheapie. Let's have a look at a few, and maybe try ad work in the odd drive-a-hard-bargain gag.

AMERICAN TURBO KING
Mastertronic

This is a vertically-scrolling driving game where you've got to negotiate various obstacles and shoot things. QUite frankly, it's crap. The car is virtually impossible to control (even worse if you try it with the Magnum Lightphaser), there's nothing to hold your attention and the whole thing just doesn't work. Yuck.

Label: Mastertronic
Price: £2.99
Reviewer: Chris Jenkins

Only when a game like this comes along that the efforts of top notch programming houses are properly rewarded. Compared to American Turbo King, virtually every other game on the market seems superb.

It's one of those top-view vertically-scrolling driving games which went out of fashion with Spy Hunter. In this one you're taking part in five-stage race across America; through the California Beaches, Rocky Mountains, Grand Canyon, Great Lakes and New York City. The backgrounds are fairly dreadful; for instance, the natural splendour of the Great Lakes appears as a series of blue puddles. In the California Beaches level, spectators three times their scale size stand around the raceway like something from a Letraset catalogue. Now and again you get a boulder or a bridge, and if you see a series of vertical arrows, this indicates a ramp which you must drive up. If you do, you take a leap through the air which gets you over an obstacle such as a line of boulders or a chasm; if you miss the jump, you have to reverse and lose valuable time.

Now and again hostile cars or helicopters appear; you can shoot the cars, but unless you have a Magnum light-gun you just have to dodge the helicopters' bombs, because if you're hit enough you lose a life. If you have the Magnum, you can shoot the choppers, and you steer the car by shooting the left and right bars on either side of the screen. To reverse you shoot the car itself. I leave you to imagine how accurate this method of steering is.

The biggest problem with the game is that when you use a joystick, the control of the car is so sluggish that you can yank the joystick to the left, go out of the room, make a cup of tea, ring a pervy phone line, kick the cat around the garden, and come back, and your car is just starting to think about turning to the left.

Not a winner by any standards you could possibly support.

Author: Pete Williamson (prolific)

Jump in the driving seat of a V12 turbocharged armour plated flyer and prepare to race from the beaches of California to the skyscrapers of New York. You're armed with ground-to-ground and remote-controlled air defences. You decide the direction the car takes by firing at a right/left icon on screen. Sounds like a novel way of getting about.