Race against time on the cards

Reviewed by Peter Eley

It's time to e-mail Santa and tell him you want a 3Dfx card for Christmas. You're going to need one soon if you want to play those cutting-edge PC games.

True 3D cards enrich game-playing by enhancing and speeding up graphics, but cheap they're not. VooDoo seems to be the accepted standard and early ones can be had for under $200, but VooDoo2 cards with 12Mb of memory cost from $300 to $600. Another thing to bear in mind is that VooDoo3 is just around the corner and your expensive new card could well tumble in price soon.

Don't confuse 3D accelerators with 3Dfx. Accelerator cards are now standard on most home systems, but they do not give anything like the performance of true 3Dfx cards which are in effect mini-computers.

Newman Haas Racing
Psygnosis
PC

Like many new wheelie games, Newman Haas Racing needs a 3D accelerator to run at all and a 3Dfx card for real grunt.

You're a member of the team created by movie star Paul Newman and Chris Haas and race Indy cars that shoot from 0 to 160 km/h in three searing seconds.

They can reach 400 km/h, and on smooth tracks are set to have just 1mm clearance between the car and the road.

Braking is just as dramatic, and to drop from 290 km/h to 130 km/h takes only two seconds.

It's a precise, split-second sport where tiny mistakes can demand the ultimate price.

Such simulations need a high degree of realism to be effective and 3D cards help by making the graphics more lifelike, smoother and faster.

Newman Haas is as good as most racing games and has excellent sound, dubbed from real Indy cars, which really adds to the racing experience.

Required: Pentium 133 (166 recom-mended) with 16Mb ram and a 3D card.

SIN
Ritual
PC MA15

The demo has been around for a while, and at last we have the full version, which introduces Elexis Sinclaire, a sort of cross between Carmen Sandiego and Lara Croft.

It's a fairly sophisticated firstperson shooter based on the Quake 2 engine and a lot of the graphics have that greyish-greeny-brown trademark colour.

Elexis, who looks rather stunning in a little red number, is the controlling force of SinTek, a firm that is flooding the city of Freeport with a DNA-altering drug.

Her long-term aim is to take over the world by using an army of genetically engineered mutants.

As Col John Blade, you must zap them with a variety of lethal instruments to nip Elexis' plans in the bud.

Be warned, it is a violent game and merits its MA15 rating.
--Peter Eley, 7DAYS, 03/12/98

PICTURED: Elexis Sinclaire