Chase HQ - Car Games For Kids

Chase HQ Old Arcade Review- Car Games For Kids

Chase HQ has a special place in my heart when I think about old arcade games and my personal favorites.

Taking some inspiration from Miami Vice, Chase HQ is all about chasing criminals and bringing them to justice by smashing their car into submission.

You drive a black Porsche 928 S4 Turbo and you and your wise-cracking partner get your instructions on the radio from Nancy the dispatcher at HQ.

You then have 60 seconds to race through the streets and catch up with the known criminal. If you successfully reach the baddie, your time extends for another 60 seconds - just enough time to repeatedly smash the criminal's car off the road and make the arrest.

Released just two years after the seminal Outrun, Chase HQ was arguably just as popular and captured the public's imagination just as vividly.

This time, the focus was more on fun, rather than purely racing against the clock and the game was also notably easier than previous successful racing games.

Although the game's sense of speed was incredible, especially when activating one of three turbos available, it was not much of a challenge to reach the criminals car and with any reasonable skill, you could usually reach the third or fourth stage on one credit.

My only real criticism of the game, (scrutinizing a 27 year old game at the time of writing!) is that when you run out of time and you decide to continue with an extra credit, it is actually harder because you car comes to a complete stop when you run out of time.  So you need additional time just to catch up with criminal's car again.

Back then to get the most value for money in an arcade, any player aware of this would just start again from the beginning.

Chase HQ also borrows the alternative routes from Outrun, although these choices are offered near the start of the stage and if you pick the correct one you reach the criminal a little quicker.

Other innovative features included tunnels and objects in the road which didn't slow you down, they were there for dramatic effect.

The handling of the car was not really tuned for sliding around corners, but more zipping in and out of traffic whilst chasing the bad guys.

So Chase HQ had all the hallmarks for a classic arcade game, exciting and fast action, appealing to the masses, excellent sound including some smart wise-cracks "Let's go Mr Driver!" and a catchy them tune when the criminal's car was reached.

On a side-note I was ecstatic when the Spectrum conversion got such great reviews and I remember taking the bus to my local town centre and buying the game for £9.99. For a spectrum game, it was awesome!

Chase HQ went on with a sequel which introduced gun play, which I also liked very much. They were fantastic car games for kids!

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Sega Afterburner Game Review

AfterBurner Arcade Review

Afterburner was one of my favourite arcade addicting games as a kid growing up.

A lot of people attribute Afterburners success to its fantastic graphics which used similar hardware to Outrun and Super Hang On.

The graphics certainly were excellent. The scenery flies by so fast you almost believe you are Tom Cruise flying a F14 Tomcat!

In a similar way to Outrun, I think the Afterburner graphics still looked amazing even five years later.

But it wasn't just the graphics that were stunning.

The fast paced scenery contributed to super frantic gameplay which saw you dodging head-on missiles which was the enemies primary attack.

Faced with wave after wave of missile firing jets, you are a one-man army in a jetplane!

As well as dodging planes and firing your own missiles as they lock on to targets, you can also adjust your speed, from a slow braking cruise to a super-fast 'afterburners on' boost.

A lot of the time the afterburners are just for show, although you do have to use them to avoid missiles chasing you from behind!

Arcade Classics

Your machine guns are there for shooting down planes stupid enough to fly in front of you! They will also come in handy when taking the two canyon runs so you can strafe campsites, fuel depots and communication towers!

In another nice touch, you see the bike from Super Hang On in the first canyon run and then the Ferrari car from Outrun in the second one.

Afterburner is one of the most addicting games once you get in to the fast paced action and to top it off it has some incredible rock music up there with Sega's best.

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Outrun Arcade Review

Outrun Arcade Machine Review

Wow, where to begin with one of the biggest icons of my childhood.

I have fond memories of being on holiday and getting myself into trouble because I had spend too much money on Outrun!

As a kid I only got to visit arcades when I was on holiday or day tripping at a seaside resort so I can't really remember my very first encounter with Outrun although I had probably seen screenshots in a computer magazine before getting the chance to play the outrun arcade machine.

Sega really hit gold with the design brief for Outrun.

You get to race a gleaming red open-top Ferrari Testarossa with your blonde girlfriend sat in the passenger seat covering various stages from the starting point at the sea-front, to tunnel ruins, tulip fields and desert.

Right at the start of the game, in bright sunshine and sega-blue sky, your Ferrari skids from the side to the starting grid in front of a captive audience. The flag is waved, and the fast paced racing begins and never falters until you either run out of time or finish the five stage run.

I feel I have to talk first about the fantastic graphics, which were ground-breaking at the time.

What you have to remember was Outrun came out in 1986!

I remember still being wowed by the game five years or more later and thinking wow this game is really standing the test of time.

Technically, Outrun wasn't using a brand new ground breaking engine. We had seen similar visuals in Space Harrier, but where that game was pure fantasy, Outrun took the impressive sprite scaling to a whole new level in the context of road racing.

The other cars for example, although flat sprites they were designed in such a way and scaled so smoothly as you got closer that they really did look 3D at the time.

Other design features that boosted Outruns already flashy visuals were the way roads scaled up and down simulating the rise and fall of hills.  The roadside scenery was also taken to a new level for the time introducing much larger road side objects and in fact one of the stages sees you racing underneath ruined tunnel pillars, which still maintains its hypnotic effect even today!

The general sense of speed was also very accomplished.

The stage selection mechanism was also innovative, instead of choosing your stage at the start you could branch left or right at the end of each stage opening up a pyramid of a total of 15 stages with 5 possible endings.

Gameplay was pretty much spot on, all you could ever ask of an arcade racer. Steering sharply made the car skid continuously towards the edge of the bend possible inventing the arcade-style powerslide mechanic.

Outrun was much more forgivable than Super Hang On which I reviewed earlier, you had to be really rubbish to not be able to get to the second stage and this forgiveness extended to the ability to recover some crashes by changing down, spinning your Ferrari and then carrying on!

The cherry on the already very tasty cake was of course the amazing soundtrack.

Yet another innovation allowed you to select your music on the radio at the start and each of the three tracks were lively up-beat happy melodies that had a carribbean vibe.

But I never could decide which was better Magical Sound Shower or Splash Wave!  

Sega would go on to create more awesome games like Super Hang On and Afterburner. Check out my other reviews.

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Super Hang On Review - Arcade Review

Super Hang On Review - Arcade Review

Back in the late Eighties, when OutRun was still wowing audiences in Arcades, Sega released the sequel to the very successful motor bike racing game Hang On.

Super Hang On featured OutRun's undulating hills and also introduced a turbo boost that could only be activated once the top speed had been reached.

I didn't very often get the chance to play the arcade version of Super Hang On and the chances are you are more likely to have played the Megadrive (or Genesis in the US) home console version.

This review however is based on the arcade version available today via the MAME arcade emulator.

When playing the arcade version for the first time (either ever or for several years) there are two things that immediately hit you.

The first thing is how awesome the games soundtrack is.

Now I realize nostalgia plays a part here, but great video game soundtracks should not be taken for granted. With Super Hang On you get not one, but FOUR soundtracks to choose from before you start.

Admittedly, one of the tracks is a bit rubbish, but the other three are great and two in particular Outride A Crisis and Winning Run are outstanding.

The second thing you will notice is how bloody hard this game is!

You really do need to 'Hang On' as the pace is fast and furious with extremely tight time limits.

This really is old school gameplay, most of your games literally last 90 seconds each as you try to reach the third or fourth stage!

As with most successful arcades of the era though, Super Hang On certainly has addictive qualities (they had to be good enough to convince you to spend more money!) and you can find yourself playing ten games in a row even if progress seems to be almost non-existent.

I was playing with a 360 joypad and found that the analogue controls were too sensitive and try as I might to adjust the settings in MAME's tab menu it didn't seem to make any difference.

In fact, even changing the difficulty setting to 'easy' also didn't seem to make much difference. You can, if you really want to switch the timer off in the cheat menu.

But without cheating, I think the best I managed was like stage 5 on any of the 4 selectable continents!

The game does benefit from enhancing the video display, again in MAME's tab menu settings. Also, if you are using a widescreen monitor, don't forget to shrink the horizontal size of the screen just to make it that little bit more authentic!

It is also worth noting the differences to the Megadrive version and the Arcade.

Back in those days the term 'Arcade perfect' was over-used, only because before 16-bit consoles were launched we just hadn't seen such colourful graphics in the home before.

However, the Megadrive version is by no means arcade perfect.  It does not have the silky smooth 60fps of the arcade, and while the music is pretty much spot-on, the in-game special effects are very inferior.

So, Super Hang On is one of my favourite arcade games but it is brutally hard and also demonstrates how addictive good quality racing gameplay can be!


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Did Star Wars TOR miss out on a chance to innovate the MMORPG?

I decided to take advantage of the free weekend to see for myself what The Old Republic was like. After having invested a few years in LOTRO, I wanted a new MMO to offer some new gameplay elements as I was well aware LOTRO and WoW were very similar. Bear in mind though I never actually played WoW, so I refer more to LOTRO in this article.

To maximise the difference between my TOR experience and LOTRO, I chose a PvP server and a bounty hunter with an allegiance to the Empire.

Naturally, you start off with a big flashy intro movie, but for some reason half way through the client minimised itself returning to the desktop. Switching back, the screen was black but the audio was still present. So I had to skip it and could not see a simple way of replaying it.

TOR is a more polished experience than LOTRO once the "WTF do I do?" moment has passed.

There seems to be less skills to worry about and the quest objectives are a lot less grindy, I only came across one "Do x20 something" quest and that was an optional side quest.

It is also nice that the game has no problem with adopting an immoral stance. You can be a right bastard if you want to be, killing targets in cold blood and returning his head to an unexpecting wife. A nice contrast after the morally sound LOTRO.

Just being in the Star Wars universe firing a blaster and rockets is also nice after all the medieval hacking and slashing.

It is also nice that every quest given pulls out a simple cut scene using the in game engine with voice acting, your own avatar also has his own voice and personality (although you have choices in almost every dialogue). Much better than just a window of text!

However, mechanically TOR is pretty much the same game as LOTRO (or WoW), in almost every way.

Quest hubs, trainers, taxis, countless mobs (they also respawn a lot quicker than in LOTRO), it's all there.

Combat with blasters at range feels nice initially, but I could imagine repeatedly bashing the same two or three icons could revive that familiar fatigue we all know and love. You stop strafing in combat fairly early on when you see laser bolts twisting around to home in on you - it's not your dodging skills that determine the outcome if you get shot, it is of course the dice-roll.

I didn't get a chance for group play or for someone to kill me in the short PvP area I was in. But I got to level 8 and managed to escape Nal Hutta (a rather dreary, swampy dirt hole) for the brighter Imperial capital.

It goes without saying that the graphics are nothing special, far inferior to current non-mmo titles and surprisingly TOR has very similar graphical capabilities to five-year old LOTRO.

I understand that there are MMO fans out there that are happy to play the same format but in different colours and perhaps with an extra lick of paint, but once was enough for me. I'm not counting of course the other MMO's that were actually different. I enjoyed Planetside and Eve Online as they offered very different experiences to WoW/LOTRO/TOR. 

The forthcoming Planetside 2

I will probably have another go with TOR at the next free weekend as I did enjoy myself, but not enough to pay a monthly fee, for that I await the next generation of MMORPG if indeed there is another pay-per-month MMO.

2011 Gaming Review

I can't really remember such a great year for gaming goodness.

I began the year by playing yesteryears games (I'm always behind these days) I was still playing the wonderful F1 2010 released September last year. Although not perfect, it was wonderful to play an F1 sim again after so many years of mediocre F1 racers. I did find myself making the game easier for the two toughest tracks Monaco and Singapore which are as hard as nails compared to the others. I played two seasons (19 races each) in the two slowest teams on the grid. I must have been rubbish at the media interviews as any decent team did not have interest in me until winning the championship in HRT (!) bagged me a seat at Red Bull!

I just can't face F1 2011 just yet, it's way too soon and will probably just skip it if 2012 game comes along next year.

Next on the menu, Batman Arkham Asylum picked up in a cheap sale. It's a great movie type game with bone crunching combat and featuring some very clever gadgets to play with. Again, Arkham City will just have to wait a while!

I then began another game which had been on the backburner for a while Red Dead Redemption which I  blogged about earlier in the year. I much preferred this to which I felt was a rather formulaic GTA IV.


With RDR finished, the summer had begun and so too my rather mixed experience of Portal 2 which I also blogged about. Lara Croft Guardian of Light was also very enjoyable, a nice surprise really which in an odd way reminded me of the 8bit title Where Time Stood Still. 

With the Autumn came the blockbusters of the year, the first of which I played was Deus Ex Human Revolution. I loved the original a decade ago, and this prequel has been nailed delivering just as much tension and moody Blade Runner atmosphere and challenge.

The stealthy bits and radar remind me very much of Headhunter (which itself borrowed from Metal Gear Solid), the overlooked Dreamcast/PS2 action/adventure from ten years ago.

Because of the £1 introductory offer, I played Deus Ex via the new cloud gaming service Onlive and I managed to play it all the way though without any major technical hiccups. Onlive itself a great technical feat that nobody actually thought would work, but we were all proved wrong. Next year could be a very big year for Onlive if they can sort out the prices (Nobody will pay full price for lower resolutions after all).

Game of the Year Runner Up

Not having played much multiplayer FPSes for a while, it was with much excitement that Battlefield 3 rolled in to town offering a brand new graphics and physics engine. The graphics really are amazing, the best yet seen this generation. You could even be forgiven for thinking you are looking at the next generation.

Offering larger maps and more tactical freedom than Call of Duty, it was also nice to see the PC version offering even larger maps, levels and visuals that the platform is capable of rather than just another console port. There are so many ways to play Battlefield, that combined with regular matches with friends guarantee many months of play.

2011 Game of the Year

Despite its flaws, the Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion was a cracking game. An open world RPG set on a grand scale with pretty graphics and the freedom to match it, hell it even played well on a console five years ago.

But in those five years, a master piece was being created. A game which would fix Oblivion's mistakes and perhaps bring Tolkien-esque RPG gaming to the mainstream. A game which would become Steam's fastest selling title ever and even beat COD and FIFA in the sales charts.

The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim will be seen by many as one of the best RPGs ever made. Playing better on a joypad, it has never been easier to traverse a fantasy world with a first person view point. The dual wielding system lets you arm yourself with a shield and sword being able to use each other via the two trigger buttons or if you prefer sorcery you can launch your favourite two spells simultaneously while in combat.

The icy snow of Skyrim will allow some players to pretend they are adventuring in Westeros from Game of Thrones, added to that the epic dragons which once slain offer the player special abilities.

I have many months of great gaming to come attempting to juggle Skyrim and Battlefield 3 :)

Four Steps to Revive Nintendo's Recent Bad Fortune

As much as anyone tries to deny it, Nintendo has fallen on hard times. It only seemed like yesterday that the Wii and DS were printing money and Nintendo executives could wipe their derrieres with our hard earned cash, but no longer.

The company has managed to ostracise swathes of gamers with their 'casual-friendly' approach to the Wii, and the launch of the 3DS earlier this year can't really be classed as anything other than calamitous.

So what can Nintendo do about it? Well, if they follow these handy tips then their luck is bound to turn around... 

1. Ensure that the Wii U has a great launch  Considering how Nintendo has managed to collapse in on itself after the poor early sales of the 3DS, the Wii U really has to really hit the ground running. Some of the main issues with the 3DS on launch were the high price point and the lack of games. Nintendo will be hoping to avoid falling into the same trap again. So far they've made a great start on the games side of things by attracting a large amount of 3rd party support. Titles such as The Darkness II and Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor's Edge mean that there will be a selection of great games available from day 1. The issue, though, is that some of these games may be released on rival consoles before they hit the launch of the Wii U in 2012. As a result, titles such as Arkham City - due to come out on PS3/360 next month - could already be old news by the time the console is released. Perhaps Nintendo's greatest concern should be the distinct lack of quality exclusive titles announced for the system. 'Exclusive' titles such as Killer Freaks From Outer Space and Lego City Stories won't be shifting consoles and Ninty really needs to have one or two great 1st party launch games lined up to guarantee that the Wii U sells. If not, the console really could struggle to find its feet. 2. Keep doing what they're doing with the 3DS  Nintendo screwed up the launch of the 3DS big time. A poor line-up of early games for the system, delayed launch of the Nintendo eShop and expensive hardware proved to be a massive entry barrier for would-be purchasers, but since then Nintendo has made some positive steps towards fixing errors. It was wise for Nintendo to take the big decision to slash the cost of the console, as sales of the system have jumped 260% in the US since its price cut. It was also a stroke of brilliance to compensate early 3DS adopters with 20 free games through the Ambassador program as it ensured that the dedicated fanbase kept their faith in the company. The console's position has also no doubt been aided by the rapidly approaching end to the 3DS game drought. Big hitters such as Super Mario 3DS Land and Mario Kart 7 are due before the end of the year and titles such as Kid Icarus, Paper Mario and a raft of impressive 3rd party titles such as Resident Evil Revelations and Metal Gear Solid 3DS arriving next year. The recent 3DS conference has also generated further enthusiasm for the 3D wonder with a new Fire Emblem and Mario Tennis being announced for the portable. The future of the 3DS is looking bright again after a distinctly murky patch and our advice to Nintendo would be to not screw up what they're currently doing. 3. Improve their online facilities  It's no longer 2006 and Nintendo can't get away with burying its head in the sand when it comes to providing a competent online service. Xbox Live and the Playstation Network are miles ahead of Nintendo's current internet infrastructure and Ninty needs to provide a service of a similar standard with the Wii U otherwise it will be in real trouble. It is remarkable that in this day and age Nintendo still doesn't have a suitable platform for DLC. Downloadable content is essential to the way we game these days and it is bizarre to think that up until recently developers have had to churn out DLC on discs for titles such as Rock Band on the Wii. This is an issue that has to be addressed. Online play should also be streamlined to provide a better service. Super Smash Bros. Brawl, one of the Wii's most popular online offerings, was subject to bad lag and a generally poor online experience. Either a free or paid online service would have to match their rivals otherwise people will simply buy multiplatform online games on other consoles. Nintendo absolutely has to produce a capable online service for the Wii U in order to be successful. However, with the criticism that has been launched at the user-unfriendly layout of the 3DS eShop it seems as though Nintendo still has a lot to learn. 4. Win back the hardcore  Nintendo marketed the Wii as a casual, gamer-centric console: one that could appeal to the entire family. It was fantastic business sense and console sales went through the roof, making Nintendo millions in the process. But there was a catch, although the Wii sold like hotcakes, software for it didn't always sell, especially for those games made by third party developers. This resulted in many developers moving onto pastures new. At the time Nintendo didn't need to care as it was rolling in cash but now it is facing a situation where the casual console gaming bubble has burst and it has to win back the type of fans that may have moved onto the 360 or PS3. It appears as though Ninty are doing everything possible to prove that the Wii U will be a serious gaming platform. It is slowly but surely managing to lure back developers to create content for the Wii U and having the support of developers such as Square Enix and Tecmo Koei will likely expedite that process. Nintendo has gotten itself in an awkward situation: as much as it wants to lure in more 'hardcore' gamers it isn't willing to surrender the casual market it has conquered in the last few years. It will be vitally important for the Wii U to appeal to both groups sufficiently, otherwise the predicted decline of Nintendo will become a reality.

Author Resource:- Written for Submit Game Article by Joseph Dart.