Game Review: Continental Circus (Amiga, Virgin Mastertronic)

First landing in the arcades in 1987, Taito released their Forumla One styled racer Continental Circus to critical acclaim. Notable for being the first truly 3D arcade racer, featuring the use of glasses available for the player to use in both the full size and stand-up version of the cabinet, it was quite an ambitious game for a home conversion when Virgin Mastertronic secured the license for this Amiga release…

Continental Circus – Not Your Typical Arcade Racer

It was quite obvious from the start that the 3D mode wasn’t going to be kept, so all of the home versions were stripped back to be a straight port of the gameplay side of things alone. In that respect Continental Circus different from other racers. It didn’t offer courses over a series of laps, or linear courses that you had to beat from start to finish as you did in OutRun.

Instead there are a total of eight courses on offer, each split into sections, and an overall time limit to race against. At the end of each section is a checkpoint and as you would expect, reach these and your time is extended. Run out of time and it’s game over. The Real difference is the goal of the game… While you naturally want to get to the end of each course, that’s not your primary goal. Instead, it’s your track position that matters more than anything else. At the start of each course you’re told what your starting position will be and what position you need to finish in to be able to move on to the next one.

From Arcade To Home

The arcade original ran at an absolutely blinding speed and there was no way that this could be recreated on any home system at the time, and the same has to be said for the 3D mechanic found in the arcade hardware. Instead Virgin Mastertronic focused on the gameplay itself and transferring that as best as possible – keeping all of the eight courses intact, the need to navigate past the other drivers to get the best placement in each race and so on to preserve the core game itself.

Crash And Burn

One thing that can prove to be frustrating in many racing games is how it handles collisions for the cars – either with other cars or the trackside scenery. Continental Circus deals with this in a number of ways. First, a single hit to your car will trigger smoke from your engines and as soon as this happens you’ll need to make a pit stop as urgently as possibly. The longer you wait, the greater the risk of your engine catching fire and your car exploding. A second collision will also trigger the instant destruction of your car.

Losing your car isn’t the end of the world though – your car will just respawn back on the track a few seconds later so the worst that can happen is that you lose a few valuable seconds of time from the race. The only thing I did find with the damage system is that your car is very sensitive when it came to collisions and even the slightest contact set the smoke bellowing. In fact, a slight nudge of the joystick on the way out of the pit lane could even cause a crash there!

Slow Down Speedy!

It’s not just collisions that can damage your car as well. Sometimes you can actually drive your car too fast so you need to keep an eye on your speed at all times. If you do drive too quickly while your engine is smoking, you’ll have to slow down to let the car cool down or once again it will catch fire and explode. And driving too quickly for prolonged periods of time will also overheat your engine and cause it to start to smoke so you need to make careful use of your gears and brakes. You should be using these while cornering anyway but this extra way of taking damage gives you that extra reason to be cautious.

In The Driving Seat

Controlling your car is simple enough – left and right on the joystick naturally steer your car and pushing up and down are used to accelerate or brake. Pressing fire switches between high and low gears and that’s pretty much all there is to it. When you need to visit the pit lane to repair any damage to your car, these will appear at set positions on each track displayed by red barrels on the left. Just steer towards them and you’ll drive straight in and stop automatically and once the repairs are completed, just accelerate straight out.

Let’s Try That Again

One thing that particularly impressed me was the continue system. In your typical arcade shoot-em-ups, you’d expect a continue feature will restore all of your lives and send you back to the beginning of the level that you’re currently on (unless you’re in a two player game and then your lives are just topped up). Being a stage based racer, you would think that using the continue option just gives you the chance to try the current race another time. But that’s not quite the case…

When you re-start the game after using one of your continues here, not only does the game resume on the same course, but you start in the same track position you ended your last race in. So if you managed to fight your way through the other cars and made it up into 80th place, for example, that will be your starting position at the beginning of the race. And that extra touch might just be enough to get you to the position you need reach at the end of the race so you can move on to the next course.

Playability

What really matters is how well Continental Circus plays… and to be honest not very well. It’s not as fast as the arcade original and that’s perfectly understandable – that ran at a mindblowing speed and if that was recreated in the home I’d wonder how it would be playable, let alone something that you’d be able to control in any meaningful way. But where this really struggles are the races themselves. The time limits for each segment of the races are punishingly tight, and that’s not helped by the poor collision detection. Far too often you’re taken out by crashing into other cars when you think you have a clear path past them, and then you end up losing valuable time waiting for your car to respawn back on the track.

I don’t mind racing games that use a damage system for collision between cars or scenery but when it’s this easy to crash it becomes frustrating. It’s no fault of the developers as they had to go with the original game design, but these game mechanics can work really well when done properly – just look at Pitstop II on the Commodore 64 to see how well it can really be done.

Graphics and Sound

Visually, this does quite a good job of recreating the arcade original on the Amiga. While it can’t match the speed of Taito’s cabinet, it’s at least managed to retain much of the look. The cars are detailed and well animated, everything is colourful and most importantly moves smoothly throughout. The only real compromise that has been made on the visual front is that all the other racers on the track are now the same colour as each other.

Sound is limited to a below average title tune and the now standard engine noises during play and frustratingly the sound effects used when you overtake any of the other cars always play out of the left hand channel of the Amiga’s sound chip regardless of which side you pass the car. A slight tweak to alter the sound so it changed speaker dependent on where you were overtaking would have made a huge difference here. But generally the sound isn’t really much to shout about.

Overall

While it’s a relatively competent conversion, what this really shows is the limitations of the original arcade game. Strip away the 3D gimmick and it reveals the flaws in the original design leaving you with a game hindered by a clunky damage system and frustrating collision detection. Even at its best this wasn’t going to be anything more than an average racing game, but bearing in mind the fact that the first two games in the Lotus series were already several years old at the time this was released and had already become the benchmark for Amiga racers, this just was always going to struggle to get off the starting grid.

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