Subject: REVIEW: 4D Sports Driving
From: Mark Sachs <[email-masked]>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews

SUMMARY: Despite tragic and crippling flaws, a fun game.

"4D Sports Driving"
Publisher (US): Mindscape

I was eagerly awaiting this one for a while, since playing "Stunts"
on an IBM PC well over a year ago. Upon hearing that "Stunts" had
finally been ported to the Amiga as "4D Sports Driving," I immediately
ordered it. How do I feel about it now? Well, somewhat ambivalent.

First, though, the meat of the game. 4DSD is a stunt driving game,
a la Hard/Race Drivin'. You get to pick from ten different cars,
from off-road vehicles such as the Audi Quattro and a Lamborghini
jeep through "street-legal" machines such as the Porsche Carrera and
Lamborghini Countach up to racing cars such as the Jaguar IMSA and
Porsche March Indy. Select one of six different opponents with their
own personalities, (digitized) faces, and styles of driving. Pick one
of the six included stunt tracks or design your own, and then take off.
Incidentally, this was written by Distinctive Software -- the same folks
who did Test Drive and Test Drive II: The Duel.

Good points first: On my 3000 at least, the 3-D graphics were very
smooth and, although not overly detailed, not annoyingly simplistic
either. There is a wide variety of stunts to try out, including
loop-de-loops, elevated freeways, corkscrews, pipes, tunnels,
and drawbridges, plus a variety of scenery to look at. The opponents
are nifty; they come on screen to snarl or gloat at you after a race,
and they drive with personality. They're not perfect, either: they
sometimes crash! After some doomed dueling with the robotic-perfect
drivers in most other driving games this was quite refreshing. There
is an elaborate instant-replay function that lets you save your most
spectacular crashes to disk and continue driving from any point. Best
times are saved along with tracks. The track editor is endless fun
(I've assembled some REALLY nasty ones...) And finally, most important,
the cars are responsive and perform differently (they each have their
own, digitized, dashboard with different indicators and dials -- not bad!)

Now the bad parts: 4DSD suffers from a horrible case of IBM conversion-itis.
The still graphics are very badly translated and suffer from terrible
color banding and very bad flicker. Most bitmaps seem to be in 16 colors,
and extremely poorly re-mapped colors at that. Outside of the actual 3-D
(which has some odd graphics glitches, though nothing serious) it's like
operating a PClone, complete with uglified button handling, faked windows,
and all. The hard disk installation program was broken; running from
hard disk, I couldn't change cars and the program tended to crash (though,
to be fair, it hasn't crashed running from floppies -- which can be backed
up, as they are standard AmigaDOS.) Finally, it doesn't seem to save your
configuration, which means every time you boot up you must reselect your
favorite car (disk access, disk access) then your favorite track (disk
access, disk access) then your usual opponent (disk access, disk access)
then your OPPONENT'S car (disk access, disk access) before finally getting
to fight past the manual-based copy protection in order to get to race.

So what's my final opinion? Getting through all the red tape and
IBMification will make you tear your hair out... until you've finally
gotten to the starting gate. After that, I must reluctantly admit
this game is a hell of a lot of fun: grabbing a high-performance
Jaguar and then screaming down the track with engines thundering
around you, cutting off your opponent Skid Vicious at the turns...
and, best of all, making your own courses that are much more evil
than anything the authors came up with.

Recommendation: Don't pay full price for this unless you really want
to; we want them to do a better job of converting IBM stuff! However,
if you can find 4DSD cheaper, by all means get it. I paid $21.95 for
4DSD and I figure it's worth that much -- but not much more, solely due
to the bad porting job.

Technical stuff -- 4DSD doesn't mind AmigaDOS 2.04. It likes an
accelerator; however, the "Options" menu has six levels of graphic
detail so presumably it can run acceptably on an A500 (try before
you buy, however.) Also, the simulation speed is settable between
normal and accelerated machines. The box states that 1 megabyte
of RAM is a minimum, and claims to be HD-installable though I
had little success with that aspect.

[Your blood pressure just went up.]       Mark Sachs IS: [email-masked]
 DISCLAIMER: Penn State cares about my money, not my opinions.
  "All my father wanted to do was make a toaster you could really set the
    darkness on -- and you perverted his work into those horrible machines!"