Crazy Cars III

"Put your driving skills to the test across 60 different routes. Weave through the traffic, beat off the competition, collide with your opponents and drive them off the road. Avoid roadworks, and most of all, watch out for those cops
Put your money where your mouth is! Bet on the winners and earn yourself a fortune to spend on entering more races and customizing your car. Many driving environments: city, desert, mountain roads, falling snow, pouring rain, nighttime driving and more.
Superb joystick-vehicle responsiveness. Hyper speed graphics with precision sound. Highly Intelligent police and opponents will all give you a hard time! Many options: turbo-boost, night vision, radar detector and more. Four league divisions with realistic betting system."

Crazy Cars III was a huge upgrade over the previous two games, a complete rebranding essentially. There are four championships to compete in but you are going to need money to get through them. You get to decide which races you want to compete in and build up the funds to buy upgrades and championship pass. Harder tracks award more money but you need to pay into it to compete and you only getr one chance. Do you save up and work your way through the races or go for broke and risk all the money in a single race, you decide! You can even spend time int he lower championships building up your bank account then just go straight for the championship passes cutting out much of the game, again you decide the best way to the end.

Along the way, you can keep upgrading your vehicle to make it faster and easier to control. This comes in handy on those tracks with bad weather or way to many corners and outrunning the police. Getting caught will fail an event and require a fine to be paid. If you get in a bit of a squeeze, there is the 'oh shit' Turbo Boost button that allows you to zoom off. Beware that those turbo boost are very expensive and should be spared for when you really need them. Between races you may need to repair the car as not doing may impact the next race slowing you down.

The longplay goes the each championship, IN FULL!. This is not the best way to play unless you really after after big money and a huge score at the end. Ideally you just race the courses with biggest pay outs, but the upgrades as they come and go right to the championship final events when you can afford them. The video would be less than half the time done this way. I have played every event in no particular order in order to show each track in various conditions as you get slight differences in each division.

The game was re-released in 1994 rebranded with Lamborghini as Lamborghini American Challenge in 1994. It is pretty much the same game as Crazy Cars III with some changes including a 2 player split screen vs mode, additional music in the menu and most bizarre of all, no intro animation not even on the CDTV version, speaking of which was not released but appeared as a cover game on CD32 Special Issue 1 magazine in December of 1994. (The game retains the CDTV.TM boot file and also disables aga features) The core game is mostly the same but the night goggles have been removed as they were useless in the original game. The game also saw a PC update and SNES release with the car colour changed from red to yellow on the title screen and at least in the snes game, the goggles are useful.

Overall, it's a good racing game on the Amiga but would have been better if Turbo were to require charges between use instead of being a high cost use use once item leading to more fun gameplay. One aspect I like with the game is the police siren that fades in/out depending on how far away they are. Traffic can be annoying as well taking up too much of the road as you end up bouncing off them until cleared. The ending is a bit abrupt and short and not even a credit roll. There is no score table either so even working towards a score goal is seemingly pointless.

00:00:00 Intro
00:01:30 Division 4
01:11:02 Division 3
02:32:39 Division 2
03:48:23 Division 1
05:05:43 End