AUTHOR: Scavenger / Zyrinx RELEASE: 1996 TYP: Racing SPIELER: 1 LEVEL: 6 SPRACHE: ENG WERT: 10€

Stellen Sie sich der Herausforderung einer der härtesten SciFi-Rennstrecken aller Zeiten! Ihre Gegner rücken Ihnen mit allen Tricks zuleibe. Tun Sie es Ihnen gleich! Komplett in fantastischer 3D-Lightsourcing-Grafik!

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Zyrinx's first Saturn game is a futuristic racing game in the vein of Wipeout or F-Zero. Here, you control one of four hovercraft in an effort to obtain victory. Things seem to work a bit differently from other racing games. Your hovercraft is equipped with a booster and a jumper, each having a limited capacity. You can boost to incredible speeds, but only if you have enough booster fuel, which can be increased by picking up the green pyramids on the tracks. The jumper allows your hovercraft to hop small gaps and potholes, or ascend to higher roads to obtain bonuses or shortcuts, but you can only jump so many times before needing to replenish your jumper fuel, by collecting the blue pyramids. Thankfully, none of the computer racers can pick up these pyramids. There are also hidden booster strips on the tracks, but you can't see or use them without first rolling over its enabler switch (a silver triangle on top of a green square). Then the boost arrows appear, and if you can drive over all of them, you're going to go very, very, very fast. Just be careful not to fall off the track, or you'll respawn in fourth place. The hovercraft controls are not especially responsive, with rather poor acceleration - if you're not going fast enough up a hill (i.e. if you respawned), you're going to roll backwards a bit before your throttle picks up enough to carry you up. This can be alleviated with booster, but only if you already have some (thankfully the game seems to give you just a small portion whenever you fall off the track). Turning controls are also have a strange curve to them, in that you're either not turning hard enough (with just the D-pad) or turning too hard (with the shoulder buttons). It takes finesse to be able to control well, but it's not impossible. The graphics are quite impressive for a Saturn game, being rendered in full 3D at a solid framerate. The game is rather dark, though, as if every race takes place in a pitch-black void and everybody has their headlights on. This is probably done to mask the low draw distance. Jesper Kyd once again provides the soundtrack, and the result isn't really as impressive as his previous works. Some tracks actually get downright annoying, but again, if you're into Juno Reactor then this should be no problem for you. Scorcher was available for the PC first, containing two seperate versions of the game, for DOS and Windows respectively. Mere months later, the Saturn version was released, and was more or less identical to the PC versions, although the PC version was capable of running in high resolutions that the Saturn was obviously not capable of. http://hg101.classicgaming.gamespy.com