I don't drive. When I was a kid, I just loved the dodgems, and ever since then, put a steering wheel in front of me and I'll have the urge to floor the accelerator and ram any Mini Metros that have the guts to cross my path. I did take driving lessons at one time, but after an incident involving me, a pavement, and a T-junction that just shouldn't have been there at the same time that I was, I came to realize and accept that driving and Nick were never to be bedfellows.
    So, I spent the money that I saved by not having a car on Speccy games, and never looked back since. And for driving games, Spec-chums are spoilt for choice. Power Drift flung you around lumpy, bumpy and curvy courses, Stunt Car Racer did the same but faster, Hard Drivin' was revolutionary with its 3D filled-vector graphics, and Chase HQ outclassed them all by actually giving you something to do whilst avoiding the other cars, which was to ram the baddie - just like the dodgems! Driving games fans had the time of their lives then. Unfortunately, all those were released well after 1987, which was when Road Race came out. (Blimey, he's finally got around to reviewing the game... Ed.)
    The cover-tape wars hadn't yet started, and magazines could get away with bumping up the cover price by fifty pence and literally sellotaping a cassette (without box!) onto the cover of the mag, and everyone was happy. This was YS's first "real" cover tape (there was a demo of Rasputin taped to the cover of the first issue, but that doesn't count). Road Race got a warm welcome, but I think that's because no one knew any better.
    I'm not even sure it can be classed as a "real" driving game - sure, it was an into-the-screen jobbie, like OutRun, and looked fine when driving in a straight line, but reach a bend and you'll see just how old the game is. The bend didn't curve, merely bent into a sharp corner of about three different angles. Considering that even the 1984-ish Pole Position conversion did curves properly, and Enduro Racer did it with style in 1986, even in 1987 Road Race looked terribly, terribly old.
    The reason for this is probably guessable - Ocean went through a dreadful stage all through 1986, with games like Miami Vice, Street Hawk, and the awful It's A Knockout. The company had no direction, no quality, and few fans. Then Ocean decided to buck up its ideas and concentrate on releasing superior products from 1987, and ditched the crap games that they planned to release. Road Race looks like one of these games, hence it being flogged free with a magazine.
    The object of the game is simple: overtake as many cars as possible before you reach the end of each stage. You start at around 650th place, and you're given a target position to reach before the end. You know, just like in Power Drift, but without the pleasure. Reach the target and you go on to the next stage. Fail, and breathe a huge sigh of relief as it means you can now reset your machine and load in a much better game.
    The game is slow - you're meant to be going at 380mph at top speed, yet it feels like a milk float in a lake of syrup - and gameplay is unfair. It is more or less impossible to overtake on bends, and more often than not (in fact, all the time), you crash into one, two, or six million cars before you're back on the straight and narrow again. Control is sluggish, sound is dismal - a loud, high-pitched clatter that you can't switch off - and no real challenge, apart from one of endurance.
    It's a shame. For such a rubbish game, it had quite a few nifty features. The night driving sections were approaching exciting since you couldn't see the sides of the road. The icy stages were made harder because your car skidded a bit after each turn, and slipping and sliding proved to be a bit of fun. But everything was just so poorly executed that this was the sort of game that you only loaded once before thanking God that there are better driving games elsewhere.