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Hang onto your seat, baby, it's going to be a tough, tough ride. We're gonna burn a whole lot of rubber.

Elite's Buggy Boy is an Atari STunner. And that, to be perfectly honest, took me a little by surprise. My first impressions of this Taito coin-op conversion were of mild disappointment. It looked good, sounded good, but somehow played a little slow.

Try as I may, I just couldn't see myself finishing one section of any of the five courses. Time just wasn't on my side. And then, suddenly, it all just clicked. All the way it was fun, fun, fun.

I've never been a number one fan of driving games in the past, especially on the home computer. But Buggy Boy really cuts it for thrills and spills.

There are five courses to choose from. Each leg of the course must be completed in around 70 seonds. The course is littered with boulders, tree trunks, trees, barriers and walls. So you need to be pretty quick with the steering to avoid these traps. Hitting the boulders will send your buggy head over heels. Bashing a tree trunk head-on will send you flying through the air, hopefully landing on all four wheels again. Clipping a small stone could send the buggy up onto two wheels.

You are disqualified if you fail to complete each leg in time. A time bonus can be picked up by driving through the appropriate flags. But these bonuses can only be used on the leg following. So it's important to get in a good, fast first-leg, picking up the most extra time you can.

Meanwhile, there are points flags to hit and "score" gates to drive through. Collecting these flags in the correct order will give additional points.

The most difficult part of the courses for me were the narrow bridges, getting dunked in the water became very tiresome.

Elite's been pretty quite on the new games front of late and hopefully Buggy Boy heralds their return. It's a great "comeback" game.