Accelerator Review

Are you ready to drive? Ready to get behind the wheel of a mean street racer and take out all your opponents with your driving skills and deadly special weapons? Ready to make Nick Cage eat your dust in less than 60 seconds? Have you been waiting for a top view CD-i racing game that'll finally be better than MICRO MACHINES? We were too. Saddly, we still are.....

This is one of those titles you hold some hope for as they do have other titles in the genre on the same platform that made mistakes, and they could learn from them. Instead, ACCELERATOR copied them, and made some even worse!!

The often touchy colision detection of MM is still a case for attention, made worse by the enlargment of the vehicles. This makes it so darn easy to dammage your car just for getting close to the wall. Also, if you turn

to dammage your car just for getting close to the wall. Also, if you turn and slide next to it, the minute you try to turn away, the rear of your car will bash into the wall. Stopping you and doing more dammage than if you ran headlong into it. Sad. Adding even more frustration is the fact the computer can drive through some of the walls in the game without getting dammaged. Making the old 'Bash Them into the Wall' technique hit-and-miss at best. Even the few weapons offered for the cars don't make it any more intresting. Cost to get them isn't the overall issue, its really just how easy the sketchy collision detection makes them worthless.

Control does vary a bit by upgrading the various parts of your car, but so you really notice. Speed and armor are the first you should upgrade in most cars though, as the computer cars will start bashing and shooting early in the game, and also have a ton of speed to boot.

Sound takes its cue DIRECTLY from Micro Machines. No game sounds at all, just the soundtrack.... and frankly, what an odd soundtrack it is. Mediocre techno-crap combined with some audio

samples from famous movies. To a movie fan like me, this was the highlight of the game. Not the music, but trying to guess what movies the samples were from. Some quite obvious, others very obscure. Some classic samples come from Robocop, The Blues Brothers and other action films. My fav though should have been on the soundtrack to level 2, its actually the first one you hear on level 1. from Loaded Weapon 1 : "It's gonna take more than a couple of car bombs to scare us off this case! Not a hell of alot more!"

If I could say they fixed anything in this one from the Micro Machines engine, it would be that annoying screen jitter & jerk. It's actually pretty much non-existent. A real plus to the smooth scrolling nessessary in a racer of this sort. Saddly, the control being so oddly proportioned, it makes it less noticable, as on more complex levels, it can be hard to get up to much speed at all.

One odd note, they made no attempt to use the onboard storage in the

machine, rather all games are saved via password. Very unusual. But then again, it just adds to the overall "rushed" feeling the game gives.

In summary, this is one of those titles that was rushed out the door before production should have wrapped. Sure, it was released after the commercial death of CD-i, but even so, just a few more touches, and teting and it could have been something really nice. As it is, it's just a medicore racer at best. It's best played in short terms. At least there is a password feature.