Championship Sprint on the Commodore 64 from 1988

It's time to go eight bit racing! Top down eight bit racing. Some games of course age a bit better than others.

Championship Sprint was released on the Commodore 64 and published by Electric Dreams in 1988. It's the sequel to Super Sprint and ported from the highly popular arcade game from 1986. The full video game play review is below. Hosted on Youtube... although you can watch it directly in this page.

The aim of the game is pretty simple, which is always a good start for the people allergic to reading detailed instructions. You must race a blue car over several laps and finish in the top three of the four cars to progress to the next track.

Fire button accelerates you forward. You do have to ease off on some of the bends so some skill is involved. You can pass through your opponents like they were ghosts, but any collision with the scenery will cost you valuable time. A couple of collisions on the default settings and it's very unlikely you'll be able to catch up with the pack.

A random tornado will appear every so often. Drive into that and you car is sent hurtling in a random direction. Any damage to your car with collisions into the side can be repaired by driving over the yellow spanners which randomly appear on track.

After three races are complete, you have the option to upgrade your car.

The game comes with a track editor and the ability to change the speed of your opponents to match your personal skill level. The editor is easy to use and a kid back in the day may have got some creative enjoyment from it.

Based on that, the game should be fun right?

The experience I got from it was quite underwhelming. It doesn't quite deliver the wow factor. The allure that would have wanted me to play it again is sadly absent. A game from 1988 I would have expected a little more and for me, it will go down as a bog-standard racer.

I suspect you may have had to grow up with this game to feel much attachment to it. This game needs nostalgia power. Good to see for historical purposes. Check out the video review above!

Nick :o)

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Continental Circus - Commodore 64 - F1 Racing !!!

This ported F1 racing game should have been called Continental Circuit... but it wasn't... due to a typo. I know... amazing!

It was an error which was to earn the game the esteemed accolade of 'Cock up of the Year' from magazine Spectrum User in 1989. This unfortunate typo was carried to the Spectrum version also you see. As Darth Vader would probably have said if one of his Officers had gifted it to him on his birthday, "Your failure is complete". Oops!

So here we have it then. Continental Circus on the Commodore 64 published by Virgin in 1989 and based on the Arcade coin-op from Taito in 1987. A Formula 1 game of sorts. Below is the Channel's Youtube review.

Beyond the naming boo boo, what we have here though is a fairly decent racer. Much better than Wec Le Mans which we reviewed a little earlier and was attempting a similar thing.

Set over 8 different tracks, the objective of the game is to qualify your car up the ranks within a single lap to progress to the next circuit. It's not direct racing, but more of a trial. There are no points awarded or World Championship to win against named F1 drivers.

You start with a ranking of 100 and this decreases by 1 each time you overtake one of the drone cars on track. Get to the required rank within the lap and hooray, you've qualified. If you fail, it's not all doom and gloom as there are a few continues available to you and the good news is, you keep your rank from the previous attempt. This is most welcome and adds to the playability greatly.

Any collision with another car or the scenery results in the car smoking and then eventually catching fire, then game over. The car can be repaired by pulling into the pits, but this of course will cost you time and valuable qualifying positions. You are up against the clock as well so Continental Circus does present somewhat of a challenge which will take quite a few goes to master.

The sound is good, but he main sprite of the car could perhaps have been a bit better. The changing weather conditions are a very nice thing to see on an 8 Bit system which adds to the fun. This feature was also present on the ZX Spectrum version previously reviewed.

Overall Continental Circus is a solid game I would have enjoyed back in the day. There are better racers out there, but this is well worth a play.

Nick :o)

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