Crash


American Turbo King
By Virgin/Mastertronic
Spectrum 48K/128K/+2

 
Published in Crash #76

American Turbo King

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! But 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.

Nick Roberts

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