Game 430: Full Throttle
This Full Throttle is listed separately from 1985's Speed King on Mobygames, but other sources, including Wikipedia, describe them as the same game on different platforms - Full Throttle being Micromega's original release on ZX Spectrum, and Speed King the C64 conversion by Digital Integration and subsequent releases by Mastertronic.
Having played both, I'm inclined to agree with Mobygames' list as two different games, though they have several things in common, including the author Mervyn J. Estcourt.
This game looks an awful lot like Sega's Hang-On from the next year, doesn't it? Just uglier with flickering, monochrome sprites and no road scenery.
To my surprise, I found this game quite a bit harder than Hang-On. It seems more forgiving - the controls are pretty responsive, and there's not much penalty for going off the road; your bike just decelerates very quickly, and when you get pushed off-road because you took a turn too fast, you probably wanted to slow down anyway.
What makes it hard is the other bikers! No, you don't take a dramatic spill from your bike when you collide with an opponent. It's perhaps even worse - the computer emits a shrill beep, and your throttle instantly ceases to function. You sloooowly lose your speed until it hits zero, and only then can you accelerate again from a stop, at which point you've probably fallen into last place.
Avoiding a collision with the bikers seems hopeless. The hitboxes are impossible to read, and the constant flickering makes it even worse. When they aren't swerving left and right, they seemingly teleport left and right instead. Turns do not affect their speed or lateral movements - you, on the other hand, will get pushed to the outside of a turn, often into the path of a biker. Slowing down so that you can wait for a better opportunity to pass or for better control during the turns might seem like a good idea, but if you aren't already in last place, slowing down allows your opponents to bump into you from behind.
You can practice courses without the bikers, but it seems pointless. The tracks themselves are not challenging without opponents, and memorizing the course doesn't give much advantage in racing it.
I managed to get first place in the Donington course but it felt like luck; quite often it looked like I was passing right through an opponent's sprite. Once I got to the head of the pack it was easy to stay there.
There are ten courses in total but I didn't see the point in playing the rest.
GAB rating: Bad. Full Throttle is overly simplistic and overly punishing of collisions that you aren't given adequate means to avoid.
Game 431: Speed King
It's easy to understand why Speed King is often described as a C64 conversion of Full Throttle. You have the same premise, the same game options, eight of the ten tracks are the same or variants (even if Paul Ricard is renamed "France," and, well, look at it.
But this is a very different-feeling racer that leans somewhat into the simulation side, more so than any other racer I've covered yet. Transmission is a manual six-gear setup, with no option to drive automatic. Trying to speed through the course at top gear will consistently lead to disaster as sharp turns come out of nowhere and you'll veer off course at 200mph - or into an opponent in front of you who (unlike you) slowed down in anticipation - and either way take a nasty and costly spill.
You'll have to familiarize yourself with each course before you have any chance of coming in any position but last, and learn where each curve is, how fast you should be going before entering, and when to change gears. The game offers tools to help with this - a preview flyby (which to my frequent annoyance will play automatically after about 30 seconds on the main menu), a practice mode to try the course without the nuisance of traffic, and three difficulty levels. The maps, sadly, are unreliable as visual aids - they have some correspondence to the actual layout of turns and straightaways, but you'll need to internalize their inaccuracies - Sweden's final right-angle turn, for instance, comes almost immediately after the one before it, and not after a medium straight as the map suggests.
It's a much more demanding game than Full Throttle, and no less punishing, but this is a net positive; I'd rather fail and feel like it's my fault for sucking at the challenge than fail and feel like it's the game's fault for being broken.
My gripes with Full Throttle's rival bikers are largely taken care of here as well. They don't flicker or warp, they behave sensibly albeit not always predictably, they actually slow down during and before turns, and they cannot ram you from behind, but instead let out an annoyed honk as they harmlessly pass through your sprite to overtake you (you, however, will still crash if you ram into them from behind). Passing your opponents is still pretty difficult; it's always a struggle between the speed needed to overtake them and the maneuverability needed to get around them, and I still crash a lot, but this is an issue of skill and risk assessment. Staying ahead of the pack once you get there is quite easy... on the easiest difficulty setting. Any higher and you will have to keep up a good pace to keep your position.
But I have one new gripe, and it's a big one. There's no way to brake! Ironically, this wouldn't be as severe in a less demanding game like Full Throttle, but there's no simple way to reduce your speed on a 220MPH straightaway so that you don't skid right off the turn at the end of it. Methods of slowing down include:
- Letting up on the gas. Sometimes this is good enough, but it takes awhile to drop to safe levels. If you're driving in top gear, then by the time you see the upcoming turn it's probably too late.
- Downshifting will make you decelerate faster, and is often the more viable method, but repeat downshifts are a clumsy way to manage this, and depending on how sharp the turn is it might still be too late by the time you see it. Decelerating in advance is safer, but it's tricky to assess how close to the turn you really are.
- Riding the curb kills your speed in a hurry, but this is dangerous. It's really easy to unintentionally come to a stop or even spill this way.
The lack of brakes combined with the very short viewing distance can make for a lot of frustrating crashes, especially on the higher difficulty settings where you have to go in one of the top two gears to have a chance of passing anyone. At above 180mph or so, by the time you can see something you need to react to, it's probably too late to react to it.
Below is a video where I complete the Sweden course on "Champion" difficulty, the second-highest. Here, I pull into first place early on and stay there, and even momentarily lap some of the bikers at the rear, though it's by no means a perfect sprint. In parts I use the wrong gear and even crash a few times, but still manage to win.
I did try some of the other courses, but not all of them. It just wasn't interesting enough to take up much more of my time.
GAB rating: Below average. This is the most sim-like racer yet, which is an ambition that I admire more than I love. In the end, having gear-shifting but no brakes is a bizarre design choice that hurts the experience.
Onto the two GOTY contenders!
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