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The high speed thrills of motorcycle racing are something that ST owners have never had the chance to experience... until now. Super Hang-On offers all the best elements of Enduro Racer and OutRun rolled into one, plus much more besides.

There's a choice of four courses to race over, each on its own continent and of varying length and level of difficulty. Selecting a track takes you onto the music selection screen where you can choose from any of four tunes to listen to while you race; a novel feature and one that was sadly omitted in the ST conversion of OutRun. The race begins at the starting line, and after three second countdown you're off. A stage is completed simply by reaching the checkpoint gate within the allocated time limit. To show exactly how far you are from the next checkpoint, course map is displayed at the top of the screen, and a white line snakes along slowly to show your progress.

The bike's standard maximum speed is 280kmh, and when you reach this, the speedometer flashes red indicating that the Nitro Injector is ready for activation. Pressing and holding down the Fire button activates the nitro, boosting your speed to a breath-taking 324kmh! However, at speeds as high as this, it can be difficult to keep the bike on the road, so it's necessary to exercise some restraint with the nitro as you go round corners. Not doing so causes the bike to slide off the side of the road and crash into one of the roadside obstacles, wasting valuable time. Another threat to your success comes from the other bikers on the road. As you reach maximum speed, other bikes begin to get in the way; crashing into one of them isn't fatal but slows the bike right down, and so more time is lost. Reaching the chequered flag in the face of all these obstacles is no mean feat, and doing so results into any remaining time being transferred into points and added on to produce a final course score which can then be saved to disk.

Electric Dreams and ZZKJ have done a marvellous job of converting Super Hang-On. It's by far and away the best racing game to appear on the ST and makes OutRun and Super Cycle both look positively primitive In comparison. The graphics are nothing short of spectacular and really are almost identical to the coin-op original, generating a real sense of speed. Unilke OutRun, the hills and bends really are convincing. Sound has been implemented very well indeed. There's an excellent loading theme, more than adequate FX and four pleasant in-game tunes, although the title screen music is a bit depressing and slow. But where Super Hang-On really scores is in the gameplay stakes. It manages to generate a feeling of exhilaration never encountered in any other racing game outside of the arcades.

It's also very user-friendly, allowing mouse or joystick control, the facility to load and save high scores and even an option to change the scan rate of the game, giving two different sizes of graphics! Super Hang-On is just great, easily the best arcade conversion yet.

Bad news - there are no plans for an Amiga version of Super Hang-On. Maybe Electric Dreams could be persuaded to do something if demand was high enough... drop them a line to let them know what you think.