Hey, I remember this! Road Rash was the second game I eer played after buying a Megadr - oops, nearly dropped myself in it there. Ahem, well anyway, it was - and jolly good fun it was too - whizzing around various fictional parts of America on a fast bike, avoiding the police and knocking off anyone who got in my way. Top entertainment. At the time.

And now here we are in Amigaland 18 months later, busy reviewing all the first goodies of the New Year, when who should pop up for persusal but my old mate. Great - I couldn't wait for a quick shufty.

Road Rash on the Megadrive was accompanied by a stirring tale of competition and confrontation between two mean riders over a girl - they ended up facing each other on a treacherous highway for a ho hold barred race without rules. The girl swooned over the winner, the race was brilliant etc etc, and it was decided that it should be held every year to find the best 'rasher', or some such gubbins. Well, we've all grown up a bit since then, and EA suffice with telling Amiga owners that 'nice guys come last', and leave it at that.

As with any racing game, the aim is obviously to win races, and since we've just been informed that mild-mannered citizens such as ourselves generally come a good way down the field, it's necessary to enter into a little roughness.

We have two basic moves with which to temporarily immobilise our leather-clad competitors, and on which the game was really sold to Megadrive owners.
Depending on which joystick control method is chosen - there are two - either a dab on the Fire button or a qucik push upwards on the stick will see your rider punch anyone within arm's reach.

Similarly, by pushing down on the stick you are able to kick anyone who rides too close for comfort. A particularly well placed punch or kick can see an adversary knocked off his or her bike, but that doesn't mean that they're out of the race - you'll notice them in your rear view mirrors as they scurry back towards their bikes and remount.

Bikes are the ultimate status symbol for types like yourself - you begin the whole shenanigans on a Shuriken 400, the motorcycling equivalent of the XR2, in that it looks quite nice and sounds OK, but is about as likely to take you to the front of the pack as a Sainsbury's trolley with a wonky wheel.

You will therefore be wanting to win some money in order to invest in a better bike, and the only way to do it is by winning races. There are five tracks in all, and despite boasting such varied names as Grass Valley and Palm Desert, they are disappointingly alike in terms of layout.

Beginning always as last in the line of 15 competitors, you must fight your way through to at least fourth place on each circuit before qualifying for the second stage.

Each time you take a fall or if, say, you're careless enough to let another rider knock you off, the energy bar on your handlebars reduces accordingly. Your trusty cycle also has its own bar - if this reaches the bottom you'll find yourself out of the race and likely as not in the knocking shop for some costly repairs.

Everything I remember playing on the Megadrive version is here - the tunes have been watered down a bit, but the colourful and fast-moving multi parallax backgrounds are if anything enhanced.

What about bike speed then? We-ell... there's really no skirting around the fact that it's not very fast at all - this is quite a major problem and detracts form the game in a big way. You see, it's great fun riding around the five tracks punching and kicking as many people as you can, and it's nice to choose a new bike when you've won enough money.

The policemen and women who constantly patrol are a nice addition, and the occasional cow on the road adds a touch of humour. But what we really need from a racing game is speed - if there's no speed it just doesn't feel like a race. And frankly Road Rash doesn't.

I'm still a fan of the game, but I'm not blind to its faults. Couple all the polished elements with the lack of speed and the fact that the later stages are nothing but more laps around the same track, and what you have is an original and fun game that offers not much real challenge and soon becomes boring when played for any length of time.

Much like motorcycle riding itself, motorcycle games have always been a it or miss on the Amiga, and none more so than Electronic Arts' bizarre new racing beat-em-up, Road Rash. Mile upon mile of open road, plenty of fast, furious motorbiking action and a liberal dose of unnecessary violence thrown in for good measure.

But how do you mix aggression with the reflex-honing activities you normally associate with racing games? Simple. Here you get the chance to punch and kick your biker opponents off the road, into trees, or worse, into the path of oncoming traffic.

To be this good...
After wowing an audience of console owners, Road Rash revs on to the Amiga scene, hoping to do the same to us. But if EA think Amiga owners are as easily pleased as the console kids, they're way off. Let's face it, these guys impressed by two-inch screens and squeaks for sound effects. It's a lot harder to sway people who expect full-screen action and hyper-sonic sounds i.e. people who use Amiga.

It can't be denied that Road Rash is good fun, even if it is just a converted console game. Road Rash is a pretty simple racing challenge. There are five levels of race difficulty, with the length of track or the number of twisting turns and crossroads being the main variations.

At each level there are five separate courses, each with its own scenery, roadside objects and obstacles. You have to race on each course and finish in the top four on each one in order to make it to the next difficult level. A system of rather long-winded post-race passwords enables you to leave or enter a specific race when you feel like it, without needing a save-game disk.

Ultimate ride?
You control your bike and rider with a joystick, using one of two available control modes. The important difference is the way you handle the punching and kicking of opponents - one uses the fire-button, the other sees the position of the joystick.

Mastery of the high-speed attack is vital because your objective is to unseat the opposition by booting them off backwards or punching them in the helmet.

Each opponent has his or her own characteristics which affects their relationship with you. If you act aggressively to one character, the chances are pretty high that they will retaliate. But if you merely dodge them, and whiz by on the outside without clashing, they may offer you tips or information at the start of the next race.

Winning races means cash in the bank, and the more you have the more you can spend. And spend you will, on important things like a newer, faster bike, or less important things like fines (incurred not for punching policemen off their bikes, but for getting caught afterwards).

You also need cash to repair your bike when you damage it, and that's very likely to happen, considering the way you and your racing cronies hurtle around blind bends at 140 mph. Death wish or what?

And that's basically all there is to it. Road Rash is a blast, but it's not as good as all the hype suggests. Initial reactions are not always the right ones, and in this case it has to be said that it plays a lot better than it loos and sounds.

After a few races (when you've invested a bit of time and tried out your joystick hand) it's very easy to get drawn into the game. The sheer mindlessness of the violence nearly makes it a classic. It's just so rewarding to get away with behaviour that would generally get you killed or nicked if you were to try it for real. Your psychopathic tendencies can be lived out to the full without danger or harming yourself or anyone else, but it still feels like you've been there and done it before.

Road Rash is going to annoy everyone from the police road-safety crew to the Mary Whitehouse anti-violence brigade - and quite rightly so. After all, if people didn't get wound up about mindless, inconsequential things like computer games, then they wouldn't be half as interesting to play, would they?

Although their fears are real to them, they're not nearly as heightened as the fear you'll have when you find yourself flying over the crest of a hill at a ton plus, with only a passing Volvo to break your fall. If you can get excitement like that on your Amiga, who needs to try it for real?

It's a horrible job sometimes, this. Not always, though. Sometimes it's great. When a game comes out of nowhere that's unexpectedly brilliant and you just have to tell everyone about (like Pinball Dreams), or when something that you've been waiting on for ages lives up to all the hype (like Sensible Soccer), or when you get to come down with the fll force of righteous indignation on some piece of drivel and save people from wasting huge sums of money on it (like - well, you know the names).

But other times, you have to be the party pooper, the boy who pointed out that the Emperor was a clothes-free zone, the rotten apple in the barrel who spoils it for everyone else (That's quite enough trite clichés for now. - Ed). Unfortunately, that's the way it's going to be here.

Now, if you're all set for a hatchet job to follow that, think again. Road Rash isn't a bad game, it's just that it's not really anything special, either. Mega Drive owners would have you believe that this is an absolute classic (indeed, our fab sister magazine Mega just voted it the eight-best Mega Drive game of all-time, which it almost certainly is), but the fact of the matter is that it's... well, sort of all right.

But hang on (Ho ho - Ed) a minute, if I do the conclusion now I'm going to be really pushed to fill out the rest of the review, so let's start at the beginning.

Illegal cross-country raod racing. Beat up the (14) other racers for kicks (and to improve your chances). Win money, by bigger bikes. Five tracks, quality (finish fourth or better) on all of 'em and you move up a level (there are five). Higher levels have same tracks, but longer. Qualify at top levels and you win. End of plot.

RUN AWAY!
So how come Mega Drive owners treat this game like some kind of Holy Grail then? Could it be that they just don't have anything better on two wheels to get excited about? Well, no, because the MD boasts a version of Super Hang-On that's even better than the brilliant Amiga one, so that's that idea out.

Maybe it's the pure breathtaking adrenalin rush you get from the game's blinding speed? Uh-uh. Flat out you still never feel you're on anything other than a pleasant cruise through the countryside on a little 125cc tootie-around, and even when you get to the higher levels and buy the supposedly monster machines, nerve-shredding high-velocity thrills are conspicuous by their absence.

Could stunning graphics be the big hook, then? Nah. The sprites are fine, but the animation's less than amazing, roadside scenery is minimal and unimpressive, and the bike doesn't actually look like it's connecting with the road.

Sound, perhaps? I think not - the bike's engine makes a horribly annoying whiney racket, and while the music's pretty groovy (this is still the Mega Drive version we're talking about, by the way) it's no substitute for a good throaty throttle throb. So, um, what's left? Oh year. How could I have forgotten? You get to punch people in the face. Mega Drive owners, eh?

The first thing to notice about Amiga Road Rash is that - hurrah! - all the top face-punching antics of the Mega Drive version have been transferred with striking accuracy to the big white doorstop, so the main ingredient for a top-quality conversion is present and correct.

Indeed, everything else about the MD game has also been transferred with striking accuracy (apart from the really shabby screen border effect, where the horizon completely fails to keep time with the horizon on the actual screen, but you don't really notice during play ) - you'd be hard pushed to spot any differences between the two games at all visually.

Unfortunately, the Amiga soundtrack isn't anywhere near the standard of the MD version, consisting of some pretty lumpy tunes, played slightly off-key or the same nasty tinny engine whine that really starts to make your ears hurt after, ooh, five seconds or so.

And of course, you get one unwelcome addition to the original formula - every time you race on a new track you get to hang around for a bit while the disk drive chugs and whirrs away and loads the next section for you. (Still, at least a little chap on a bike does zip across the bottom of the screen with a sign saying 'Busy' while it happens, which is nice to see. Well, it beats a black screen with 'Loading Now' on it, anyway).

Speaking of drawbacks, being converted perfectly means that the skiddy and unrealistic control of the Mega Drive game can now plague Amiga users too. Oh yeah, and one other thing doesn't seem quite right - on the Mega Drive you could get some really spectacular crashes, with your man flying over the bike handletilt head-on collision with a hefty car travelling in the opposite direction only results in a sudden stop and a little dive which just doesn't have the same dramatic effect. Call me picky if you will. (You're picky if you will - Ed)

It's funny, because I really liked playing this on the Mega Drive and there aren't any real differences between the two versions, but somehow on the Amiga it just looks a bit sad and dull when you've gotten used to Crazy Cars 3.

I think it's possibly that you tend not to expect any depth from console games, so something like this doesn't feel at all out of place - with an Amiga in front of you, you find yourself thinking 'Is that it?' The racing itself isn't all that thrilling, certainly not in the same league as CC3 or even Super Hang-On. (now a £7.99 budget game, of course), and combined with the extreme repetitiveness (the differences between the tracks are purely cosmetic, and even cosmetically they're very minimal) you'll probably find yourself a little bored in pretty short order.

It does get more challenging as you move up the rankings, but the ever-increasing length of the courses as you do so matches the increased difficulty with an element of, frankly, outright tedium. By the time you've beaten the highest level (which won't take ver long), you'll never want to play the game again.

So, an unmitigated disaster, then? Well, no. As I said right back at the beginning of the review, Road Rash is kind of all right. It's good, honest, simple fun to play, and the novelty of being able to deal out a hefty clout to your opponents as you pass them takes quite a while to wear off (especially if you've managed to get hold of a club), but when you get right down to the brass tacks of the matter, this is just an average race game with one good idea.

It pains me to be so down on what's essentially a nice game, but if you haven't already got Crazy Cars 3, and Super Hang-On, you shouldn't even think about Road Rash, and if you DO already have those, you probably won't want it. Still, it's one more good reason not to have to buy a Mega Drive.