From: "Norman St. John Polevaulter" Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Jason L. Tibbitts III Subject: REVIEW: Jaguar XJ220 Keywords: game, arcade, car, racing, commercial Path: karazm.math.uh.edu!amiga-reviews Distribution: world Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.games Reply-To: "Norman St. John Polevaulter" The best sprite-based racing game I've ever seen. J A G U A R X J 2 2 0 -- T H E G A M E From Core Design [UK] REQUIREMENTS: 1 meg RAM, PAL-capable Amiga. Two disk drives a plus. COMPATIBILITY:AmigaDOS 2.04 and accelerator-friendly. Takes over machine. No HD install. COPY-PROTECTION: Disk-based and manual, though relatively unobtrusive. REVIEWED ON: Amiga 3000/25, 4 MB FAST, 2 MB CHIP [brag brag]. Jaguar XJ220 is the latest entry into the crowded Amiga driving game market. It allows the player to drive the XJ220, the newest Jaguar, in international competition against a host of other cars. Rumor has it that Jaguar delayed the release of their limited-edition XJ220 to coincide with the release of this game! Anyway, there are 12 countries to race in, each with 3 different tracks, for a total of 36 different tracks. The tracks sport varying scenery, ranging from typical country roads to desert, mountain, and marsh courses. There is a wide variety of weather conditions as well, including rain, winds, snow, night, fog, sandstorms, and leaves. Finishing in the top ten in a race gives you prize money which is spent (all too fast... sigh) on repairing damage done to your Jaguar during the race. After finishing a country's three tracks, you have to dole out more cash to fly your car and team to another country for the next race. Countries can be visited in any order, as long as you have enough money to pay for the trip. The ultimate goal, of course, is to pile up enough points to win the whole competition! (Admittedly this is difficult at first, so just lasting through the whole series will do for a start...) Most important, of course, is the gameplay. I am pleased to report that it is excellent. The Jaguar steers quite well with the joystick (mouse control is also available, though no analog joystick.) Your computer opponents are not the dumb, predictably perfect, always-finishing-in-the- same-order opponents seen in other games. They have to drive the course just like you do. Instead of just robotically following the track, they brake for curves, try to overtake each other, and dodge back and forth to block you from passing. This makes competition much more fun than in other games, needless to say. The tracks are challenging and won't be mastered in the first sitting. The graphics are magnificent. The animation of the road and roadside objects is silky smooth, even at 10 MPH. Objects and backgrounds are big, detailed, and colorful. The weather conditions are astonishing in their execution, and it's particularly nice that they vary just like real weather (ie, on a track with rain, the rain will sometimes taper off to nothing and at other times pour down literally in sheets, making visibility quite a challenge.) In fog and at night, objects fade smoothly into view as they approach. The attention to detail is great -- yes, those are shooting stars in the night sky... Sound is quite nice. Before each race, you can change the sound with the in-car CD player -- six different racing tunes, sound effects, or a funky "radio" option that plays synthesized music and is absolutely useless because the radio doesn't play during the race. Other than that, the music is super and the digitized effects fit in nicely, from the opening shout of "Start your engines!" to the last sickening crash as your Jaguar piles into a freeway overpass. After each race you get to see the final results, and note who your best competitors are. If you won any money, it's time to spend it repairing your car. (Hitting objects during the race does not send your Jag up in a fiery explosion; you merely pull away and continue along. The damage is kept track of during the race.) After repairs, it's off to the next race or the next country, via the very slickly-done world map screen. You also have the opportunity to save the game after every track. There are a couple of extras in Jaguar XJ220 -- a two-player mode, and a map editor. The two-player mode splits the screen into top and bottom, and both players race simultaneously. The speed (on my machine, anyway) is just as good as in one-player mode, and competing against a human is lots of fun. Both players pool their money for repairs and airfare, which makes sense if you think about it -- there'd be little point in continuing a two-player game if one person dropped out. What would have made this perfect would (of course) have been a modem play option! Ah well. The map editor is fairly basic, but I won't complain -- it does the job, and it promises to give the game a little more life. You select a country and one of its tracks, and from there can adjust the course and scenery to your heart's desire, making it as twisty or as straight as you please. You cannot, however, change the fundamental characteristics of a course: the background landscape is fixed, the weather condition (rain, fog, whatever) is fixed, the number of laps is fixed, and the selection of scenery props is limited to what was put on the original track by the programmers. You can't, for example, take a waterfall or cliffside from a Swiss track and put it on an English track. I would have liked to see a little more flexibility here. The presentation of the program is very slick, with different music for every part of the game. Customizability is emphasized -- you can adjust control sensitivity, manual or automatic steering, fire button or joystick up to accelerate (using the fire button to accelerate gives you the ability to simulate the dubious real-life maneuver of stomping on the gas and the brake at the same time) and so forth. There is disk access between the sections, but it isn't TOO annoying. Now the compatibility gripes: 1. The version I played was the PAL version (of course) and it uses the whole PAL screen. However, it does not automatically flip the computer into PAL mode. Come on, guys, you KNOW this! 2. This will only apply to A3000's which boot Kickstart from the hard drive. If you stick the Jaguar Disk 1 into the machine and switch on, Jaguar XJ220 takes control before the computer has a chance to load Kickstart, and then trips and falls on its face. I solve problems 1 and 2 by booting the machine normally, and then rebooting in PAL mode with the Jaguar Disk 1 in the drive. Works fine (the program itself has no problem with Kickstart 2.04 or an accelerator. In fact, it's probably taking advantage of the '030.) This doesn't really annoy me, though your mileage may vary. [Could anyone tell us how this performs on a stock 68000 system? - JLT3] 3. I was very disappointed to find out it wasn't HD installable, though I wasn't really expecting otherwise. HD installability would speed the in-between segment disk access considerably and make loading and saving games and custom tracks a lot less tedious. * NOW, THE REAL QUESTION: HOW DOES XJ220 STAND UP AGAINST LOTUS TURBO II...? Er... well... *blush* I have no idea. I've never played Lotus Turbo II. But I have played quite a lot of other racing games, and XJ220 knocks the sprite-based ones into a cocked hat. Lotus Turbo II would have to be one hell of a game to beat XJ220! The Final Verdict: XJ220 is a smashingly super game and I'd say it's a must-have for racing game fans. Just like Microprose F1GP rose to the undisputed top among vector-based racing games, Jaguar XJ220 is poised to grab the top position among sprite-based games. Get it. [Your blood pressure just went up.] Mark Sachs IS: mbs110@psuvm.psu.edu DISCLAIMER: Penn State only cares about things that are green and fold easily. "Don't panic!" "I'm not panicking. I'm watching you panic. It's much more entertaining."