Spectrum Holobyte-MicroProse
World Circuit Racing
VIRTUAL KARTS
Personal Opinions by Dave Gymer
My brother Simon bought VK a few days ago. I've played it briefly, and
we gave the network play option a very quick test. As promiesed, I'm
about to present some personal opinions about the game. I have _not_
played the game extensively.
The packaging
The game comes on a single CD-ROM, with an alarmingly slim manual and
a registration card. I'm sure I'm not the only person out there who
really hates companies which don't ensure that registration cards have
the postage pre-paid. MPS could at least have some sort of on-line
registration facility on their web pages. Anyway, that's a minor
personal gripe. As I mentioned, the manual is pretty slim and, whilst
it has all the basic details, provides very little background
information. Remember the F1GP manual? Now, there was a manual worth
half the cost of the game. But the VK manual doesn't appear to have
even been checked very carefully. Is it really too much to ask that
"Schumacher" and "Alain Prost" are spelt correctly? This manual will
not enhance the rest of the world's view of the US educational system
_*grin*_.
Installation
Installation is fairly simple, incuding auto-detection of your
soundcard. I had the happy choice between my SB16 and my UltraSound;
the game chose to autodetect the latter so I stuck with that. One
thing that did annoy me was that the CD auto-installed and ran when
inserted on Windows 95. I disabled this feature as soon as I realized
it was happening, but I don't really think that it's suitable
behaviour for a DOS game to do this. Just my personal take on things.
Another small gripe is that the CD jewel case doesn't have any sort of
inlay, so you will have to add a stick to the spine if you want to
identify it in a rack of CDs.
Setup
There are quite a few different controllers to select from, but one
thing that really annoyed me was that you can't do any of the neat
stuff F1GP let's you. You can't change the key assignements at all,
nor can you "pick and mix" keyboard, joystick and pedal controls. I
chose to use the T1 setting with my T1 pedals and joystick. But worse,
far worse, is that the joystick code is seriously flawed. It seems
that after you calibrate your controller, once you get to the track
you will find that the kart constantly pulls to the left. Needless to
say, this rapidly becomes extremely annoying and makes accurate
control impossible. Neither Simon or myself have trim wheels on the X
axis of our various sticks so we couldn't even trim the problem out.
Simon managed to fool the game by calibrating the "center" position of
his joystick slightly offset, but I just couldn't get it to work at
all.
This seems to indicate a total lack of serious testing. In fact, the
whole game has a "nearly but not quite" finish, and was probably
rushed out for seasonal reasons. Those of you who have whined about
GP2 missing the Xmas rush take note - if GP2 had been released before
being properly finished, you can be sure that it would have done the
game great harm.
And another thing: there's a music icon on the options menu, but
turning it on has no apparent effect. Huh?
Gameplay
Oh dear. This game had so much potential, yet it seems to have been
almost totally wasted. You remember what I said about GP2, that the AI
can make or break a game? Well, the AI in VK appears to suck big time.
Even the F1GP computer cars were usually smart enough to try and avoid
a parked car. In VK, if you park at the side of the track, the other
drivers just pile right into you, shouting "move over"! Fortunately,
they aren't quite so bad once you get moving, and the game provides
for up to 8 players to take part on a network, so the AI is very
nearly dispensible. As I said, Simon and I gave the network game a
quick blast and it seems to work okay.
Conclusions
As I've already said, the game appears to have been rushed out before
Xmas without quite being finished. That's a real shame because with
just a little more spit and polish it could have been a really superb
game. Hopefully SH-MPS will put out a patch to fix the joystick
calibration problem, at which point I might buy my own copy and try
the network play out properly. I can't honestly recommend that you buy
this game unless you either have a trim wheel on your joystick's
X-axis, or you don't mind fiddling around for 30 minutes getting it
right, or you are a total karting fanatic.
I'm going karting for real on Monday 18 December. I'll let you know
how it compares. _*grin*_.
_________________________________________________________________
Copyright © 1995 by David P Gymer
All rights reserved
These pages are not endorsed or supported in any way by Spectrum
Holobyte-MicroProse Software.
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