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I have to admit that I love it when publishers get so carried away with their own publicity that a reviewer can drill almost every incredible claim full of holes. "Take control of £70,000's worth of gleaming E-Type", epoused The 4th Dimension. "And avoid hazards galore in this ingeniously converted Archimedes game featuring all the thrills of the original plus a few new features too!" I wonder if they wrote their inlay before or after they playtested this sad OutRun knock-off. Or I wonder if, by 1990, and with very few people still buying Electron software, they realised they wouldn't be around for much longer and could probably ignore all the flak.

What we have here is a car driving game, viewed from behind the car. And never mind £70K, I'm not sure if I'd part with £70 for this plodding rustbucket. The legendary E-Type car's top speed seems more comparable to that of a horse and cart than a Grand Prix racer... and those "hazards" the inlay mentioned? They consist of roadworks signs and, in a baffling inclusion, large stationary policemen.

There's only one thing to do with this game, and that's to laugh at it. When it first occurred to programmer Gordon Key to write it, I have no doubt it seemed do-able. After all, Gordon's the man who gave us the Repton-beating Clogger and the trendsetting golf game Holed Out! And if the Spectrum could manage decent versions of Power Drift and Chase H.Q., then why shouldn't the Electron get at least one good arcade-type scrolling racing game? But while those Speccy classics were both highly regarded upon release and to this very day, the Electron conversion of E-Type was actually so poor that its release was comprehensively ignored. And, as soon as you start to play it, you start to see why.

The main, and most obvious problem, is the size of the car in proportion to the extremely narrow road that you need to drive it along. Added to this, comes the problem of the angle of the road. This is frequently such that the car completely obscures your view ahead meaning other cars seemingly appear out of nowhere. You'll be fumbling for the brakes every couple of seconds and, when you do crash, the game's insistence on placing the gear stick in Neutral position guarantees you'll lose a great deal of time as a result. And, in this game, time is very much of the essence.

I can't bear this game but I've forced myself to play it just so I can put my finger on just what makes playing it so fiddly and frustrating... and timing is a critical factor. There are six controls - left, right, accelerate, brake and gear up and down. To continue playing the game, you must reach invisible checkpoints before time runs out, and time is significantly decreased when you crash, or have to slow down to avoid the other cars on the road. When you're not squinting into the distance trying to discern whether the blobs on the horizon are other cars or actually bits of your own car, you're desperately trying to slow down to try and get the car into the centre of the screen. As you might expect, all this concentration eats into the time you have to actually get through sections of the "race" (I mean, I assume it's a race of some sort, it's never really explained!) and frequently you'll find everything brought to a standstill with the message "Out Of Time" as a direct result. Why, oh why, can't you just hit the accelerator and power through?

You may well instinctively try to avoid those boys in blue too... After all, using automobiles to ram cops into an early grave didn't become popular until about a decade after E-Type. But, rather incredibly, the time you have to complete each stage will actually increase for each policeman you mow down... And yes, I do say "mow down" with some sarcasm; the crawl at which you approach them would actually leave them more than enough time to simply step out of your way.

I don't know, perhaps these cops are suicidal. Play E-Type for long enough and you probably will be too.

If you haven't been thoroughly put off E-Type by now, then wait, there's more! In an obvious nod to OutRun, your E-Type driver isn't travelling alone. He's accompanied by a bit of totty in the shape of a blob with a mop-top for hair. As we all know, seatbelts are for losers. In the world of E-Type, there's absolutely nothing that can go wrong if you're driving an open-top sportscar at speeds of over 200mph and not wearing one too. That's because, if you crash, you simply stand up and sit back down again. For a game that takes itself so seriously, it's comical to the point of being sublime.

The game is one of the few multi-loaders on the Electron, so if you make it far enough down that long, lonely road, you'll get to encounter the inevitable 'Searching For Level 2' message and can go off to make yourself a cup of tea while it loads in.

Oh, alright, it's not all bad I suppose. The graphics are passable for an Electron game and I suppose we should give The Fourth Dimension some credit for at least trying to get a racing game of this type onto it (even if what emerged was a monstrous failure). And playing it now via emulation, you can always crank up the emulation speed to the extent that it plays with a speed that it could never achieve on the hardware of the day.

In summary though, E-Type is one of those games that looks reasonable in screenshots but is a total disappointment to play. It wasn't very successful back in the early Nineties and it's certainly not worth playing now. Nonetheless, because it did take a risk in trying to produce something different, and because it didn't sell well, some collectors have argued that it's worth adding to your Electron games collection for those reasons alone.