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The arrival of a new Epyx game is something of an occasion. It's likely to cause fights in the office as to who's going to review it. This time I won, and I'm a bit sorry that I did.

Super Cycle is obviously a bike racing game - nothing wrong with that, especially from a company who produced one of the best ever racing games in Pitstop II and a crafty rip-off of Sega's Hang On coin-op game. I settled into the chair with the Konix joystick expecting some high speed action.

After a bit of option selecting, bike colour, style and colour of leathers (!) and more importantly skill level I was ready, bent over the bike, sandwiched between two other riders, staring down a race track that looked like a gun barrel. Good job I selected level one!

As the buzzer went I stabbed the fire button and we were off. Three gears only, all selected by pushing forward on the stick when the very realistic tachometer started to float into the red.

Very quickly you find yourself doing an eyeblinkingly quick speed round a deceptive strip which has you thinking it's all straight until a great arcing bend creeps up from nowhere and has you forcing the stick over in your palm to avoid being slung off like a top.

After that the strips get progressively difficult with varying conditions to be taken into account. There's a desert track, a snowbound one, and one that looks like the M1 with one-lane roadworks everywhere. Elsewhere you drive through a thunderstorm, and encounter a kind of links strip scattered with doggy doos especially imported from the beach where Bump Set Spike was made.

Every so often you'll encounter bonus tracks on which you have to ride over flags spread along its route.

Throughout you race against the clock, gaining bonuses for completing a circuit in under the specified time. This turns the game into a two wheel Pole Position, but doesn't in my opinion make it as good. Although the game features none of the glitches present in the Datasoft game it doesn't have the same desperate competitive edge to it which always brings me back to it.

Sure the graphics are fine, the banking excellent and the sound throughout of high quality right down to an engaging tune which refuses to use the pitch bending cliches all C64 games seem to depend on now. But something is missing and I think it's the lack of encouragement to overtake, or more specifically the lack of other racers on the circuit. There's never been more than two on the screen at a time and they seem fairly dispersed. On higher levels there are more, but they seem to appear out of thin air, from behind, doing a speed of which my 750cc machine was incapable, spreading me across the track like strawberry jam.

So a good bike simulation, better than Elektraglide only as good as Speed King and as a racing simulation not in the class of those we know and love.