Game Review: Turbo Champions (PC, Mastertronic)

Even though Mastertronic was a British company, once Mastertronic Inc was launched it opened up a new market for their games. As well as seeing a lot of their Commodore 64 and Atari titles being released on disk, they also released a number of titles for the PC. One thing of note was that this expansion also saw the release of a number of titles that were exclusive to the American market, including this arcade racer Turbo Champions…

Turbo Champions – High Octane, High Ambitions

Hitting stores in 1989, Turbo Champions promised a great deal. Boasting 8 tracks, sprite scaling, a track editor, 16 colour graphics (hey, this was a big deal back then!), hills, tunnels and fast 3D you can appreciate that this was going to appeal to fans of arcade racers. With a player car that looked as if it came straight out of the arcade smash hit Out Run, Mastertronic seemed to be on to a winner.

Getting Started

Once you’ve chosen your control method and graphics mode,  you’re presented with the main game menu that lets you choose between the race or track designer. At this point, there’s very little on-screen information to help apart information on what keys to press to choose your control method/display mode and how to select your tracks. When it comes to actually playing the game, you’re told absolutely nothing at all and the manual (which consists of a single, double-sided sheet of paper) is no help at all.

Controlling the car didn’t seem to work with the mouse, and joystick control just wanted to keep veering off in one direction so I had to opt for keyboard.  This was supposed to be a case of using the cursors to steer left and right and brake, and the numeric keypad to change gears (acceleration is done automatically). In reality, the only keys that did anything were left/right for steering! I can forgive the joystick/mouse options for not working running this on my Windows 10 PC via DOSBox, but that didn’t excuse the keyboard controls.

Start Your Engines

On to the courses, and this is where things get strange. The box and manual boast of 8 courses, but in fact there are over a dozen to choose from here. Either someone at Mastertronic didn’t check the game properly, or Turbo Champions was revised at the last minute before release. Regardless, from this screen you can select a number of tracks to race on and as you select them they’re added to a list at the top of the screen.

The first track is classed as the “qualifier” and once you begin racing a timer counts down and you have to get to the end of the course before the time runs out. Manage to do it and your time is extended but this is where things didn’t seem to make sense during play…

Where Am I?

Once you start racing, there’s no lap counter or on-screen map so the only information you have at your disposal is your score, lap time and how much time is remaining. There’s also no indication at any time as to how many laps you have to do of any of the tracks and this is where Turbo Champions gets confusing as a player. Once you’ve got past the initial section with the shorter time limit, each track is relatively easy as the time extensions are quite generous and unless you’re quite a sloppy driver you can keep playing indefinitely.

While you’re playing, it feels as if you’re driving on a single track in a never ending loop and not progressing through all of the tracks you have selected in order. In fact, the first time I played Turbo Champions I drove about 30 laps before deliberately driving into the scenery and other cars just to make sure that the timer had run out. By that point I’d either driven through all of the tracks several times over, or had been stuck on a single track and repeated it ad infinitum.

Crash City

While Turbo Champions is mildly playable, the repetitive nature of the tracks gets boring very quickly. There are only three types of other vehicles on the tracks apart from yourself and two of these are just re-colours of your own car, the third being a large truck. The track visuals are the same for every track, with just minor changes to the background graphics on the horizon and the only real difference is the track layouts themselves and the occasional use of hills and tunnels.

If the boredom factor wasn’t bad enough the game suffers from unforgiving collision detection so even the slightest brush against any of the other vehicles will cause you to burst into flames quicker than a vampire in daylight. The worst part is the fact that you are frequently hit from behind by other cars on the track and unlike other racers, instead of giving you a nudge and dropping your speed, again your car just explodes, losing valuable time while you’re put back on the track!

Graphics And Sound

As you’d expect from a PC game of this era, they’re fairly chunky but as promised on the packaging the 3D does run at quite an impressive speed for something that wasn’t making use of any dedicated 3D graphics hardware. Despite being confined to a 16 colour display, the colours are bold, and everything is clearly defined although the player car seems to have something of an identity crisis. For the most part, it’s clearly *cough* inspired by the Ferrari in Out Run, but whenever you crash and flip the car over or spin out, the graphics change both in the look of the car and the visual style completely and instead of a convertible Testarossa, it’s now a different car completely!

Sound is quite basic though, and there’s no music and just a single tone playing representing your engine noise, although it does change pitch when you go through tunnels.

Track Designer

Moving onto the track designer next and here you’re presented with a blank screen and without the use of the manual absolutely no idea what to do as once again there are no on screen instructions. Using the keypad (so no use for laptop owners), you select different track pieces to add on from the start point you see on screen. Once you’re happy with the track, simply press F to finish it and it will be saved to disk when you can select it from the track menu.

With no option to test it before saving or playing without going to the track menu, it’s very much a case of trial and error. Also, this is another case where there’s very little information given in the manual – it tells you what to do to edit the track, but not what keys do what, or what types of track they lay down so you’re generally left guessing as to what you’re actually doing.

Overall

Turbo Champions had the potential to be a fun, albeit average racing game, but ultimately it’s let down by the repetitive gameplay, collision detection and a control system that makes the game all too easy to play. While this was never going to be a classic, with just a few tweaks here and there this could have been one worthy of attention but instead it became easily forgettable.

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