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Ooer...! This sounds like one for me; futuristic racing cars with protective bumpers, astounding laserpowered turbo-charged engines, nine stages of crumbling raceway to negotiate and a bunch of slavering alien taxicab drivers and not a Give Way sign in sight. After the Huntingdon Ring Road on a Saturday, it sounds like a doddle.

LED Storm is another Capcom licence. Never having found the arcade machine in local newsagents, I'm slightly unsure as to the fabness or otherwise of the coin-op. I'm assured by other people in the office that it's an extremely good conversion.

Still, maybe it's better to approach these things with a fresh eye. LED Storm is a tuned-up variant of the old old Race game. Remember? Driving a car along a plan-view track which widens and narrows and twists and turns. There were oil patches and bonuses and extra fuel cans to pick up.

Well, while things have definitely been seriously tweaked, the basic principles still remain. You've got to make your way through nine stages of top-bottom scrolling roadway. The bonuses have now become extra energy stores, hazards come in the shape of the other racers a the oil patches, well, they're still oil patches Now. When I say scrolling, don't go thinking of jerkyspaz, slow-scroll. This is very fast indeed and once you've had the pedal on the floor for a couple of seconds and you're running at top speed, the scenery really flashes by.

In your path are futuristic equivalents of today's traffic nightmares. There are the unspeakably inconsiderate truck drivers will simply mash your vehicle into the wall, cars and motorcycles are to be avoided and there are leftovers from Frogger - roller-skating toads that cling to the back of your motor in a desperate revenge attempt.

First impressions of LED Storm are great. The action is fast and you can memorise the tracks and gradually drive faster and faster. J I over the chasms and breaking crash barriers is great fun and you can sneak up behind other racers, boost yourself into the air and smash on top of them. Har, har! After quite a short period of time, though, I found myself re-reading the instructions and asking myself, "Is that it?" Well, old stick-shift, that is yer lot!

The later levels are obviously more varied and the bad drivers appear with frequency.

The backgrounds are different too, but that's hardly a big bonus.

While there are stacks of games around that rely on a single basic idea - Arkanoid et al, most shoot outs - the playability has to be tuned to perfection and I just didn't feel that Storm was there. Maybe I failed to pick up on the addictiveness, because I found myself feeling thoroughly ambivalent towards it.

If you thought the arcade a was your cup of tea, then I'd happily suggest you give this one a whirl. It looks like a good conversion and. so far as I can tell, all the elements from the original have been included. If the idea of racing from the bottom of the screen to the top for an eternity fails to do anything for your spark plugs, steer clear. (Yak!).

Good conversion of the slightly uninspiring coin-op.