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It never fails to surprise us how far the ten-year old Game Boy can be pushed, even with its new colour revamp. Games come along every week that look so incredible you'd never believe that they are running on a machine that originally wowed people with Tetris!

Then a racing game appears and you go hurtling back through time to the Eighties. All of a sudden you're watching "Fame", wearing leg warmers and playing a machine that was designed long before anybody thought of 3D graphics.

On the plus side, it's blindingly, stupendifyingly fast! The track hurtles past at near warp speed whilst you fly along against the other two-wheeled racers.

The bad news is that the old-school approach to racing games was a league behind the modern approach. Corners appear out of nowhere and you just stick to the side of the road and hold the down control until you get back on the straight. There's a remarkable lack of thinking required and the result is a glorified test of reactions.

As far as racing games on the Game Boy go, Suzuki is definitely up there with the best of them. There are sixteen different tracks to race on (that is to say, the colours and background image change) and a variety of different weather effects including fog for the first time ever.

If you must have a racing game on the Game Boy Color then get Suzuki Alstare as it's one of the best for the system. By rights that should ensure that it gets a really high mark! But the truth is that so far no Game Boy racer has impressed us the way other types of game like Mario Gold, R-Type DX or Zelda have. Hopefully somebody out there can make a racer on the Game Boy that'll knock our teeth out. Until then, we'll just keep playing Pokemon.

If racing games can't successfully be converted to the Game Boy Color, why bother converting them at all? Ubisoft had a fantastic game on its hands with Suzuki Alstare on the Dreamcast, but to create a Game Boy version - somebody there must have had a bad batch of snails for tea that night!

The bikes are tiny, the tracks are monotonous and the gameplay is annoying as the track sweeps left and right with little warning. We've seen it time and time again - and we don't want to see it any more!

Graphics 60%
Fast but a bit sparse!

Sound 80%
Vrooming good bike noise!

Playability 80%
Good in an old-school way!

Lastability 40%
Almost as deep as a puddle!

Overall 72%
Close but no cigar!