Burning Rubber

"It's the ultimate road racer. It thunders through six European territories and bullets across the USA. It's not just a head-to-head between happy snappin, fast driving, boy racers, this is seriously hot competition against the meanest drivers on the tarmac Beef up your hatch-back to enhance the speed and handling, plan your route and burn off the bizzies. So fire up your engine and pump up the gas for some fearsomely dangerous road racing BURNING RUBBER the sweet smell of victory."

This game was published in two flavours. One for 1mb A500 class machines and another for 1200 AGA computers although this version also works to some degree on 2Mb A500 class machine with some gfx issues due to lack of AGA. Both come on four disks and its interesting that the A500 game does not take advantage of extra ram to provide the extra features of the 1200 like the additional music. I'm sure they could have just released one version that adapts to the spec of the Amiga it was being run on.

The game has a strange opening for a driving game but great presentation over all with some good and some less good music within the game with some recognisable samples from pinball dreams amongst others. The dance intro is very similar to a 'State of the Art' a demo by Spaceballs. Some of the graphics like the shop are reminiscent of Gremlins supercars. The game contains twelve tracks split between Europe and the USA and each track has a theme to match the country racing in. After choosing a car, which notable all have their own dashboard, you start off in the garage shop where you buy upgrades and then onto the map screen to choose your route, ideally the fastest route but less curvy might be more favourable. Only sfx is available in this version and that's probably for the best.

Once we get into the race we first start to notice where the corners have been cut. The game plays like Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 but doesnt look or control half as good more resembling the original crazy cars. Alright for 1990, but not 1993. The car models are quite basic looking looking like a carboard cut-out placed on the road with no animated tires simulating movement and no break lights in the 1mb game.. like really. Controlling the car can feel a little over sensitive at times causing some unforced crashes and the framerate of the raster bars can be off-putting. But it's not all bad. The races are way to easy at least the Euro tracks with the opponents barely competing. This means you can take your time as you don't need to hold the button down and can break when needed without much penalty. As long as you chose a fast route you will make first place with a huge chunk of time between you and the nearest opponent. The gap is smaller on the USA tracks and made more challenging by putting pedestrians in the road! Occasionally you will come to a junction or a turn in the road much like in Cisco heat. you really need to slow down in advance as you don't want to miss the turn. It can result in a bad crash or on an alternate route. There are police as well who will attempt to stop you by getting in your way. Getting caught or crashing the car results in a spent credit and a restart of the race.

Overall, not the greatest Amiga driving game but there are some good ideas in it that were just not well executed. If you can look past some basic looking gfx and low frame rate and get a handle on the controls, the game can be enjoyed and the overall presentation of the game helps you forget about that bad bits. Disk loading can be quite long but there is some nice music which is different for each track while it loads.

00:00:00 Title / Intro
00:01:08 Flashy Dance Intro
00:03:43 Menu / Car selection
00:06:05 Scotland
00:11:00 London
00:16:25 Amsterdam
00:21:38 Paris
00:26:47 Germany
00:31:32 Barcelona
00:37:53 USA Car Select
00:39:55 Washington
00:45:14 New York
00:50:03 Rushmore
00:57:37 Las Vegas
01:05:30 Los Angeles
01:13:36 Florida
01:18:28 Ending
01:20:29 Highscore Music
01:25:33 Game Over / Arrested