The One


Chase HQ

Publisher: Ocean
Machine: Amiga 500

 
Published in The One #16

It's high-speed Miami Vice-style action all the way with Ocean's conversions of the game that put the chase into the race genre. Gary Whitta dons designer suit and puts pedal to the metal.

Chase H.Q.

They're tough, they're fast and they wear clothes that make Crockett and Tubbs look like they shop at Mister Byrite. They're Tony Gibson and Raymond Brody, two streetwise supercops from New York with a love of sports cars.

They're both assigned to Chase Special Investigation Headquarters, a division of the NYPD that specialises in all manner of car-related felonies, from jaywalkers and joyriders to escaping convicts and drug-crazed serial killers.

Armed with the division's pride and joy, the Porsche TA-2000 (a state-of-the-art armoured sports car), Gibson and Brody earn their wages by indulging in high-speed car chases with all manner of law-breaking speed freaks with the objective of bringing them to justice - by fair means or foul.

Chase H.Q.

With a coin-op as beefy as Chase HQ, the programmers could have made the mistake of trying to emulate exactly the look of the original, thus producing something that's superficially coin-op perfect but subsequently gets overtaken by milk floats and BMXs.

Fortunately though, Pete Hickinson and Bill Caunt made playability top priority, and the result is a conversion that, while noticeably slower, feels and plays uncannily like the coin-op, right down to the criminal car-crunching.

There are plenty of nice touches, like the squeal of tyres that accompanies a gear change, the high-pitched hiss of the turbo injector and the blaring siren that comes into action when the crook is sighted. And of course a generous helping of sampled dialogue as supplied by Nancy and your partner.

An impressive selection of the coin-op's music during the attract and introductory sequence gets the pulse racing, but unfortunately there's nothing so impressive during the game - the original Miami Vice-style music has been replaced by a slower piece that plods along in stark contrast to the high speed action.

But that's only a minor quibble - capturing the thrills of the original is what counts, and Ocean's conversion has done that admirably.