Previous Next

Yet another conversion of yet another top arcade game. Not tha there's anything wrong with that, really. If the licence isn't too ambitious and the right programming team are used, chances are you can produce a good game. Which is exactly what failed to happen with Chase HQ. I can like a game and I can dislike a game but hardly ever have I left a computer game feeling so depressed.

The Chase HQ arcade machine made its impact, not as a driving game, but through the ideas and presentation. It's your job to drive along interstates arresting an assortment of perpetrators by ramming them off the road with your turbo-charged Porsche. Up until you reached the criminal's vehicle it's a pretty run-of-the-mill time-limited driving game, with a couple of samples thrown in. The action starts in earnest when you reach the bad guys' car (usually a very expensive sports number). The accelerator is literally floored and the useful turbo button thumbed home. Now it's just a question of being able to run the car off the road before the timer runs out. All the way through the machine is turning out samples such as "Oh man" and "Ooh yeah".

After seeing some of the recent driving games/sims on the Amiga I did hole some high hopes as to the quality of this conversion. Sadly it looks as though it's been rushed to meet the Christmas deadline.

The most important feature of any car game is the road and how it generates a feeling of speed. In this case the road works well, it's just the scenery that fails. Temporal distortion is the only excuse I accidentally been swept up, this plays nothing like the arcade machine. A huge disappointment for me, and it will probably be the same for other HQ fans. That said, Ocean will be on to a winner simply with the name.