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There aren't a lot of 'behind-the-car-view' racing games for the BBC. There was Superior's long, straight Overdrive, which wasn't particular realistic, and then Acornsoft's Revs which was considered state of the art by the racing drivers of the early Eighties, and far too complicated by everybody else. So that left most racing fans to get their kicks by playing Superior's Crazee Rider, because that was literally the only game with curves in the tracks plus decent gameplay.

E-Type arrived late on the BBC scene (1990) and most BBC games players had moved onto Amigas or Segas by the time it arrived. Heck, if you were into racing games, you might have even just opted for a second hand Speccy and the excellent conversion of Chase H.Q. that that machine boasted. If not, however, if you were still somehow stuck with a BBC Micro, you might have been tempted by The 4th Dimension's claims that you could, through this new game, take control of £70,000's worth of gleaming E-Type. You might also have noticed the author of the game to be Gordon "Clogger" Key, and thought, if anyone could pull off a Chase H.Q. clone on the Beeb, it would be him.

So, is E-Type worth playing? Well, I will give the BBC version something right off the starting grid, so to speak... It's a hell of a lot better than the Electron version. And that's not just because the BBC version is disk-based, and allows you to choose which of the circuits (or 'Tracks' as it calls them) you want from the main menu. It's actually faster, much more colourful, and the sound effects are, unsurprisingly I suppose, much better too.

The E-Type car is a manual transmission - you know, the five gears that British car drivers are used to and American car drivers can't understand - so you play E-Type by accelerating up through the gears, a handy engine intonation sound or, if you prefer, a speedometer at the bottom right of the playing area, makes switching up through the gears pretty easy. It's only when you get to maximum speed in fifth gear that the car starts to fly along though, and the road is often littered with obstacles including bales of hay, roadworks and other cars. Most of the time you're forced to keep your speed much lower than optimal to avoid crashing into them!

In a remarkable coding achievement, the roads not only curve but include hills and valleys. Just as remarkably, the cars and obstacles on the road are plotted in perspective, and grow in size as you catch up to them. The effect isn't 100% perfect - come on, what did you expect? - but it's not bad for such a limited machine. If you collide with an obstacle, there's an animation of the occupants of the car bouncing up and down as it comes to a complete halt and, if you happen to lose the road next to a lake, your £70,000 dream car will sink into it. In the first case, you'll have to put the car in neutral again and build up your speed all over again. In the second case, you're done. I should also point out that all of this happens without the tiniest amount of speed fluxuation.

However, to get all of this working as well as it does, it's clear that some big sacrifices have had to be made. The biggest one is that the playing area is very small, only about a third of a Mode 5 screen. The E-Type car sprite is a fair size and starts in the centre of this playing area. Whilst initially all seems well, when you have to start steering on the constantly weaving road, you notice that you can't really see where you're going. The car sprite is so big that it obscures about a third of the horizon, and when you're heading uphill, you actually find yourself craning your neck in the vain hope of seeing further. I kid you not.

The mechanics of the game are a bit strange too. The objective is to complete each of the tracks and, like many racing games, you won't be permitted to keep racing unless you reach a certain checkpoint within a set period of time. That's fair enough, expected even. However, you'll need to increase that timer if you're ever going to make it to the checkpoint in time and the way you do this is... by running over policemen. They obligingly stand in the road, not moving and holding up one hand to request that you stop. But your aim is to splatter them across the E-Type's bonnet instead. For a racing game and a law-abiding citizen, it's a little bit disturbing. Although I suppose wanton hooligans and carjackers will have no problem with it.

Anyway, get your head around this and you can start increasing that timer, and with a bit of concentration you can start to remember how each tracks winds and weaves to the extent that you can start to make a bit more progress with each try. However, occasionally you just seem to have constant bad luck no matter what you do. You learn to switch up and down through the gears fine, and you even learn how to overtake on the left of one car and then try to weave between it and an obstacle in front. However, all the skilful driving you might employ often won't really add up to much because you can be rear-ended by a car behind you without warning. This is very frustrating. You have no mirrors to check, so you have no idea where any of the other cars on the road are in relation to yours. If you are bumped from behind, your E-Type stops instantly, and you have to put it back into Neutral and work your way back up through all the gears. This not only takes ages - and results in many cars passing you - it also feels stupidly unrealistic - if you get buffeted from behind you'd be propelled forward, not brought to a dead halt.

The car is also far too slow to get going, making being rear-ended doubly frustrating.

E-Type is in many ways a flawed masterpiece. You can really appreciate what Gordon Key was trying to do here and I actually think it might have worked a lot better if he'd replaced the policemen with petrol cannisters and just cut out the hills and valleys for the final game. Without them he might just have had the memory available to squeeze a bit more speed out of the game, and allow a rear-end to shunt you forward rather than bring you to a stop. If you're desperate to play a racing game on the Beeb, by all means, see if you can get anywhere with it. Personally, I came to the conclusion that if this game was an accurate simulation of driving £70,000 of glistening E-Type, I'd rather have my old Vauxhall Nova back.