PC: Drive to a Mad-Max future

By Peter Eley

Redline

****

Accolade

PC Mature (US rating)

$99.95

Roll Duke Nukem and Powerslide into one game, add the excellent graphics from Unreal and you have Redline.

It combines a first-person shooter and an action driving game into a rather good-looking, if overly violent, romp through an undefined Mad-Max-style future.

You work for The Company, a big, bad corporation that sends you on a variety of missions with the aim of enhancing its profits, at any cost.

Much of your job involves turning your enemies into pixellated gore, with one of many weapons or by just running them down.

Gratuitous stuff and one that will almost certainly earn it an MA15+ rating from the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification (whose ratings New Zealand adopts).

Do we need more of this? The games companies obviously think so and Redline will undoubtedly sell well. It's a well-crafted, graphically excellent game that manages to create real excitement, even fear.

The mixture of cars and first-person action makes for a fast and furious game, if at the cost of having to learn two sets of keyboard commands.

Redline's controls are much more complex than in Quake or Unreal, and having to switch between driving and walking around in the heat of battle requires no little skill.

Like many first-person shooters, Redline has been designed as a multi-player game and supports up to 12 players on Internet via GameSpy and M-Player.

The review copy was version 1.0 and it had a few minor bugs. The most annoying was getting the car stuck against a wall and not being able to reverse out. Restarting the level is the only way to escape, so save frequently.

And Redline would have one of the longest load times in recent history - it takes more than three minutes to boot up on my Pentium 11 266.

Required: Pentium 200, 32Mb Ram, 3D accelerator.

V Rally (Multiplayer Championship Edition)

***

Infogrames

PC (G)

$89.95


V Rally has been one of the must-have PlayStation games with more than 2.5 million copies sold, and now it has finally migrated to the PC.

It's a great-looking game on the console - and it's even better on the PC.

But you need a Voodoo card to get the best out of it and a good one costs a lot more than a new PlayStation and a copy of V Rally combined.

The cars are accurately modelled on the real vehicles, such as the Subaru Impreza 555 WRC and the Mitsubishi Lancer Ev.iV WRC, which has an amazing amount of power.

You race these beasts around international settings - one is in New Zealand although the Indonesian option is possibly the best graphically.

Required: Pentium 166, 4Mb 3D accelerator or Voodoo card, 16Mb Ram (32Mb best).

* Send your comments e-mail to peter_eley@herald.co.nz

* Games are given a star rating of one to five