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Every year the centre of San Francisco gets cordoned off in preparation for the race of races. It seems that San Francisco is a dream city for people who like to drive around in car chases all the time, and the cops have a hard time with them all. So each year they close off the city centre and race each other just to prove how crap they are.
And hey presto! That's the scene set. Pretty simple stuff isn't it? Well anyway, the result of all this is that you've got a racing game in 3D, which might or might not be like very other racing game on the Speccy. Let's have a look at it or, as they say in San Francisco, let's have a look at it, man. You start off in a typical cop-car. You know the sort, the blue and white four door with a massive bonnet and boot, or hood and trunk as our Californian cousins might perhaps say. If you're still unsure as to what sort of car this is, just think back to the sort of police vehicles you used to see in The Dukes Of Hazard; incidentally, they certainly should put back its old slot of tea-time on Saturdays. The car has two gears, high and low. In low it'll do around 100 mph, but when you slam it into high gear this will whiz up to a rather spanky 175 mph which is probably much faster than they can go in real life. Do you go on the bridge? Yes, well the game actually starts on the Golden Gate Bridge. You are close to the front of a pack of about ten other coppers, all in cars which look identical to yours, but are blue, whereas yours is a rather fetching shade of red. At the top of the screen there are the usual Formula One lights, three red and one green. When the green one appears, you hit the gas-pedal. And everybody screeches past you. It's immensely annoying because you instantly lose your first place, even though you're accelerating as quickly as your car will go. Mirrorsoft must have done this deliberately because you get so angry that you concentrate on winning; which is, after all, the idea of the game. So as most of the cars burn off up the road, you've got to knuckle down to some serious work. First thing to do is suss out the gears. Although there are only two, it's a wee bit tricky changing between them. What you've got to do is pull back on the joystick and hit fire at exactly the same time. You'll lose a bit of speed as you pull the joystick back, but with any luck you'll now be in the gear of your choice. At 175mph it's pretty easy to start gaining back the places so long as the road is straight and the cars stay int heir lanes. The problems start with the corners, hills and dangerous driving of the other coppers belting along in their panda cars. Collision detection is a bit generous, shall we say. What seems to happen is that you can drive through other people, but your speed decreases to about 40mph. I wish this would happen in real life, but in the game it takes some getting used to. The Streets Of San Francisco All would be fine, dandy, and rather boring were it not for the corners and hills that make 'Frisco an interesting city rather than a corner-less, hill-less one. The sides of the road are littered with all sorts of things like trees, bill boards and telegraph poles. Hit one of them and one of two things could happen; you could spin the car round, losing large amounts of speed but basically keeping on the road. Or you could flip the car right upside down. This knackers your speed completely and will almost certainly ruin your entire life. Well, as far as this attempt on the game is concerned anyway. The race is divided into stages, and a large clock ticks away through the first stage, from the Golden Gate Bridge to Fisherman's Wharf, you get a whole chunk of extra time to blast your way further on towards the finish line. Obviously, the stages get tougher as you get further into the game, with the added bummer that if you go really fast and build up a bank of spare time, it doesn't carry through onto the next stage. So each time you've just got to go like the wind, mama! As well as the other cars, there's plenty of traffic which will happily get in the way. Obviously the police haven't done a very good job of cordoning off the centre of the city, because there are loads of cars, trucks and buses littering the roads. These often occur at intersections, where the offending vehicle will straddle the road completely. How you get round it is up to you. It's just possible to squeeze through one side, but if you fail, you'll be catapulted high into the air and, although you'll survive, you'll lose loads of speed and time. Mirrorsoft have remained true to the Jaleco coin-op, and have put in some wicked intersection corners. What you're supposed to do is look out for sign-posts at each intersection. If there aren't any you can whiz straight across (avoiding any buses, trams or stranded cars). If there is a sign-post, you've got to wait until you can read it, then swerve violently in the direction it's pointing. The bad news is that the intersections, like all intersections in the US, are at right angles. So what you're being asked to do is go round a right angle at 175 mph. A tad tricky, don't you think? Well there is a way of doing it. If you whack the gears into low just as you approach the junction, the speed slams off and you are just able to squeal round the corner. But it's dead difficult and you'll be lucky if you don't have a little argument with the kerb.
Polite police please Another weird feature which has been brought in from the coin-op is the horn. Pressing fire (or the space bar) beeps your horn, and because you're driving against pretty law-abiding policemen, they move out of the way. It's a bit ridiculous to try and overtake somebody who's doing their best to block you, then beep your horn and watch the silly fool pull over and let you past. Hmm, I think I've given you a pretty good idea of what's actually happening in Cisco Heat. But what I haven't said is what it's like to play. Here's the bad news. Cisco Heat isn't really much cop (nice gag, that). It's a mono job, with a rather poor backdrop of unrecognisable cityscape. The road isn't solidly filled in or anything. It's just a load of flickering straight lines which scroll past with astonishing jerkiness. This is the game's major problem. The frames chug past so slowly you've got time to see each one and notice how not-very-good it is. I've got a strong feeling that if everything was really quick, the graphics would look much better. The jerkiness actually affects your gameplay, too. It makes the car un-responsive, so you have to move earlier than you need. This means that as well as fighting the twisty roads and other road users, you've actually got to make allowances for poor programming. Cisco Heat has got lots of stages, and if you really concentrate on the flickery screen, it is possible to get quite far into it. However, it just doesn't have the whizzy graphics or the impression of speed that it needs. It's good, but it's not as completely brilliant as I expected it to be. You'd be better off with Power Drift on budget.
1) San Francisco will be completely pedestrianised by 1993. So there'll be no more car chases, Streets Of San Francisco or cop races.
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