Super Trux

The Good
"Super Trux" (or "Supertrux", as you prefer) is a rarity among the racing games for 8 bit computers. Not only you get to drive a truck, but you have to do it throughout Europe, with every stage featuring some related piece of scenario in the background.

And the game manages to get quite a lot of mileage of both features. The handling of the truck, for instance, is rather peculiar. It takes forever to reach its top speed, but once it's there it's almost unstoppable. It negotiates the curves better than any car, too, but whenever you reach a slope you'll lose part of your visibility. It's not a bad idea to pay attention to your windshield in this kind of situations, it's transparent for exactly that reason, and it will become your only way to avoid hitting the other participants or running into cones or road signals.

As for the stages, they are quite a lot of fun too. They have slopes, cones, poodles of oil and water and sometimes they even narrow down to just one lane. You get to choose your destination at the end of each stage, just like in "Outrun", but sometimes you will also find crossroads earlier in the stage, and a good decision can save you precious seconds.

The Bad
As with many games of the period, "Supertrux" was released in both tape and disk versions. The open ended nature of the game, no doubt inherited from "Outrun", made the loading process quite boring for tape users, who often would had to wait for the tape to go through unneeded stages until the program found the right one.

As much as I hate the 8 bit versions of "Outrun", their manuals did include a scheme were you could write the counter numbers for each stage, which was quite helpful. This wasn't the case here.

The Bottom Line
Minor quips about the loading system aside, this is one of the finest racing games I ever played on the Amstrad CPC. Rather than an "Outrun" clone with trucks, as some elements of the game seem to hint, this is a more laid back game with some unique traits. Instead of pulling off dangerous stunts, "Supertrux" favours a cold headed, almost conservative driving style.

And this being a rather obscure game, I feel I must recommend it to everyone interested.