JAGUAR XJ220 REVIEW - April 1993
| At first glance, you might be forgiven for thinking
that we've accidentally printed a load of screenshots from classic Mega Drive racer Lotus
Turbo Challenge (83% in issue four) again, but hold hard, good readers. 'Tis not so. For a
start, this isn't a Mega Drive game, it's a Mega CD one. Secondly, it's licenced by a
completely different major car manufacturer. And thirdly, it's a bit crap. 'Ooh, bit of a contentious one there, MEGA', I can hear you all say. 'Everybody else thinks Jaguar XJ220 is great, you're just trying to be different for dramatic shock value'. But it's not true. How is this game duff? Let me list the ways... For a start, where Lotus used time limits as your main enemy, in Jaguar it's money. 'Money?', you cry. Yep, money. You start (in the World Tour game) with a set amount of cash, which you have to use to buy air tickets to the round- the-world venues where you race. Do well in the race and you'll win more money, with which to repair the damage caused to your car during the race and pay your fares to the next venue. You can race the 16 tracks in any order you like, but if you try to go Britain, Australia, France, China, USA (for example), you're going to chuck a frighteningly large amount of dosh straight into Richard Branson's pocket, so it's better to plan your route carefully (what is this, a racing game or Around The World In Eighty Days with Michael Palin?) What all this means, though, is that you never encounter a 'Game Over' screen just because of bad driving - however crap you are, you'll finish every race, you just won't win much money, and eventually (after about three weeks) you'll run out and lose the game through bankruptcy. Pop! What was that? That was the sound of the game's feeling of challenge evaporating. 'But hey, that's not necessarily a bad thing, surely? This isn't an arcade game, it doesn't matter about having to keep starting all over again, does it? As long as you're having lots of racing fun, that's okay, isn't it?' Well, yes, it would be, but the time you'll spend actually racing in Jaguar XJ220 is some of the least eventful time you'll ever pass sitting in front of your Mega Drive. You hardly ever see any opposition cars, and when you do they just kind of sit there getting imperceptibly larger for about an hour until eventually you slip past them. They don't jiggle around in front of you, they don't try to get in your way, they just drive along in blissful isolation. I can't even begin to tell you how dull it all is. 'But what about all the options? It's not just the World Tour, there's a Grand Prix game too, yes?' Indeed there is, but it's just the same except you win championship points instead of money and you don't choose which tracks you race on. 'But there're loads of different tracks, with scenery and, er, weather, and stuff!' Yeah. Did you know that Australia looks exactly the same as Peru? Holland is identical to Italy, but with windmills? Now maybe they are in real life, but that's no excuse for not giving the game a bit of characterization, is it? There's no sense of excitement when you reach a new track in XJ220, partly because you didn't have to qualify for it in any meaningful way (just manage your budget carefully), but mostly because every track looks as near as damn it the same as the one before it but in different colours. And the weather? Seen it before, guv. Big deal. 'But the two-player game? You can't tell me that's not great fun!' Sorry, but I can. The game slows down noticeably in two-player simultaneous mode, to the extent that it feels more like you're driving a Chevette with the handbrake on than £400,000's worth of state-of-the-art supercar. And while jockeying with each other for position is significantly more fun than racing the soulless Mega CD drivers, it's still not as much fun as doing it in Lotus. 'But, but...' And another thing - the amount of time you have to spend waiting for the game to access the CD is a right royal pain in the butt. If I wanted an Amiga, I'd have bloody well bought one. 'But aren't there ANY good points?' Oh, sure. The CD-quality (of course) music is, well, CD quality. It's a CD of some crap elevator muzak, but a CD all the same. And JVC do deserve credit for managing (I've got no idea how) to get a save facility into the game. When you play the Grand Prix mode, you can save your game to (what? The CD? CDs aren't writeable. The Mega CD itself? But that'd lose the info when you switched the power off. I'm at a loss) one of four save slots. And you can also save any tracks you might create with the built-in Track Editor (if you've got the patience). But the thing is, the game's so dull that you're extremely unlikely either to play the Grand Prix mode more than twice or bother to spend half a day designing a track to race along when the game's already got 16 perfectly serviceable ones of its own. What Jaguar XJ220 needs, I'm afraid, is a complete Gameplay Editor. In all honesty, this isn't even as good as Out Run. |
GRAPHICS 6 SOUND 6 GAMEPLAY 5 GAME SIZE 8 ADDICTION 3 It's got nothing on Lotus Turbo Challenge, really, and it's horribly dull and annoying most of the time. The disk accessing pauses are really irritating too Ð this isn't what I bought a console for. 52 PERCENT |
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