Amiga

F1 World Championship Edition

With the Amiga conversion of the console favourite F1, Domark are the latest software house to return to the Amiga fold. OK, F1 has been kickinga round on the consoles for at least eighteen months now but it was well received there and should be more than welcome among the Amiga racing fraternity, who have been starved of a decent racing game for some time now.

Die Original-Strecken warten auf den F1-Zirkus, Schumi und seine Kollegen sitzen in den Wägen, die 3D-Grafiken sind schnell und das Gameplay ist unkompliziert. Große Innovationen sind leider nicht zu finden. Somit nur ‘Gut!'.

This has turned into a bit of a whinge, but I don't mean to be rude. F1 WCE is one of the best racing games on the Amiga. The cars corner and straighten superbly, tracks are abundant and in two-player mode it's a real blast. No, the real problem is the cost. If you have the last version of F1, then don't bother with this.

F1WCE is a rehash of a rehash, and if Harry Enfield circa 1990 was in my position, reviewing this in the style of Stavros the comedy Greek kebab shop proprietor, he would no doubt utter his patented and unfathomably funny, "Bloody cheeky monkey son!" lament. As he isn't in my position, and as I can't be arsed going down that avenue, it's left to me to talk about the game, and say, that it's easy to play but has dated badly, and although it reproduces the tracks in sufficiently realistic detail, it fails to offer the genuine excitement which has made Skidmarks legendary.

F1's got everything you could want from a racing game: excitement, reasonable accuracy, halfway-decent opponents, speed - indeed, claims suggest that it's faster - yes - even than the original F1. But it's not fun, and the reason it's not fun is that we've seen it all before, and again before that.