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We all remember Hard Drivin', don't we? I've many fond memories of standing around the coin-op, watching the steering wheel, pedals and gear stick moving of their own accord. The game wasn't bad either, although it was extremely tricky for non-drivers like me and I'd often spend the majority of the game falling off hills and smashing into trucks coming the other way.

Race Drivin' was just the same, only bigger... and harder. More hills to fall off, more trucks to smash into and even more ridiculous stunts to perform (such as the loop with gaps and the gravity-defying corkscrew).

Race Drivin' (The Conversion) contains all of the coin-op features (barring the steering wheel, pedals and gears of course), including the new Super Stunt and the Autocross tracks and three new cars to smash beyond recognition. There's even a two-player link-up option, so that your Race Drivin' owning buddies can bring their machine around to your home (or vice versa), join up with a connector cable and race around the tracks together, ride over the loops together and plough into the roadside cows together.

The original Stunt and Speed tracks are on offer and have all the features from the original Hard Drivin'. You can opt for the less hazardous Speed track and just aim to get around as fast as possible without crashing, or the Stunt track in which you get to take on the raised bridge, the dreaded loop and the 45 degree curve.

The Autocross track is just a simple racing track. Set on the dirt roads of the desert, the aim is to take the tight corners at high speeds and complete each lap faster than the last. To help you, a computer car races against you, taking exactly the same amount of time as you did on your previous lap.

The new big track is the Super Stunt course. Featuring all manner of nightmarish inventions (such as the corkscrew, the hump-backed bridge - something akin to a fairground roller coaster - the tunnel of death and loads of jumps and bumps), you're going to be hard-pushed just to stay alive, let alone complete a lap!

All the usual car simulation features are here, from the dashboard with speedo, rev counter, fuel gauges and gear indicator, to the usual three-dimensional cars, houses, road signs and cows.

One of the more familiar obstacles (familiar, that is, to Hard Drivin' aficionados) is the raised-platform bridge. It's fairly simple to negotiate, just build up enough speed, hit the ramp and let 'er fly. Of course, if you're going too fast, you may end up landing at a rather fatal angle.

Whenever you crash, you're treated to a brief glimpse of your final moments from outside the car. Watch as you plough into the mountainside or fall from the very top of the loop as gravity deems you're not going fast enough and decides to lend a hand.

Each course has a number of checkpoints to pass through. These grant you extra time to complete the rest of the track and it can be maddeningly frustrating to run out of time just in front of the line!

The most feared stunt in the entire game is the corkscrew. This little terror sees your car hurtling through 720 degrees (or more likely hurtling towards the ground) and is half the width of a normal loop. What's worse, you can't drive around it either.

Race Drivin' had one major obstacle standing in its path before work had even begun on the conversion of Tengen's classic coin-op. The whole basis for the cabinet was that Race Drivin' was as close to real driving as you'd get in an arcade, from controls to presentation. How you can adequately convert such a technical monstosity to a humble home computer is an extremely tricky problem.

Domark appears to have answered it by going for the basic playability of the machine-based game and adding all the frills on top until it ran out of room. The result is a surprisingly playable conversion. It's not without its drawbacks though.

The 3D, although hardly terrible, isn't nearly as good as you would have thought it could be, especially when you consider the technical achievements of the coin-op on which it's based. Okay, a humble 16-bit is hardly a coin-op, but there have been other 3D games that have had far more convincing (and solid) filled-vector graphics.

This sacrifice of detail does mean one thing, though: it moves like a rocket (or a very fast sports car at any rate). Even with all the background detail on, it's fast, and once you find the sensitivity setting that best suits you, you can really fly around some of the courses.

The controls are a little tricky to get used to (especially with a mouse), but if you remember that this isn't Lotus 2 or OutRun but a realistic driving game, you'll soon get the hang of "swinging the wheel" from left to right and straightening out as you come off a curve.

It's the speed that saves Race Drivin' from driving you round the bend with irritation (pun fully intended). Trying to master the controls while maintaining enough speed to keep playing is a sufficient challenge for most computerised driving fans and since Race Drivin' incorporates all the original tracks and features from Hard Drivin', you're essentially getting two games for the price of one. Which is pretty good value all round.