Lotus Turbo Challenge Games

This week on Super Adventures, I'm taking a trip back to the past... back to the early days of Super Adventures, when I thought it was acceptable to cover a bunch of old-school arcade-style sprite-based racing games in one article. I'd give them each three screenshots and write things like "Dodging cars is hard!" and "Hey, I got first place!" underneath.

I eventually learned my lesson and realised that these kinds of games weren't going to give me much to work with. You have a sprite of a car and you slide it left and right to get around the other cars and obstacles, while also trying to avoid flying off the track on the turns. There, I just described all of them.

But I could never resist showing off screenshots full of art, and it occurs to me that I never got around to covering the biggest stars in the genre. No Out Run, no Road Rash, not even Lotus 1-2-3. Uh, I mean Magnetic Fields' legendary racing trilogy, not the legendary spreadsheet software. Speaking of spreadsheets, did you know Lotus made a car called the Excel?

Anyway, I'm going to play some Lotus games and I'm going to show off all the artwork, and if I can find anything to write about them, well that's a bonus. Screenshots will be from the Amiga 500 versions unless specified otherwise, though I will have a look at some of the ports as well. These games made their way onto all kinds of systems, like the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, C64, PC... though not the NES or SNES for some reason. I've no idea why Nintendo got left out.

There was another game called Lotus Challenge released on the PS2 in 2001, but that's entirely unrelated so I won't be playing that one.

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Though before I get to the Lotus games, I'm going to take a look at some arcade games and set up where the sprite racing genre was at the time. I did this when I covered the first decade of Need for Speed games and it gave me a great excuse to show off some screenshots, so I'm doing it again.

Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge came out in 1990 and the 'dodging cars on a track' racing genre was already pretty well-established by that point. In fact, you could trace it all the way back to a 1968 arcade racer called Indy 500... if it wasn't for the fact that it's not actually a video game. The arcade cabinet used an electro-mechanical system to get its cars sliding around the screen. But the car-dodging gameplay was there.

1976's Night Driver, on the other hand, is definitely a video game. It just doesn't have any cars to dodge. You drive between two rows of dots that disappear off into the distance, so while I couldn't really call it a sprite-based racer, it does have a road.

Turbo (Arcade)

The 1981 Sega arcade game Turbo was apparently so stressful to make that the programmer's lung collapsed, but he managed to get a lot of the genre's foundations in place before being hospitalised. The game has the stripes on the road to give the illusion of motion, it's got the skyline in the background, and it's got the scaled objects on the sides of the screen that get bigger as they move down. Though the scaling technology wasn't so great back then so it looks kind of terrible.

Turbo's missing a pretty crucial feature of racing games, however: you don't steer the car around corners. The game's exclusively about sliding the car left and right to weave around opponents, with the turns being handled automatically. It's not really about racing, it's about passing as many cars as you can within the time limit. Fill the meter and when the timer runs out you get a time refill, fail and you're done.

Pole Position (Arcade)

This is more like what you want! Namco's Pole Position came out a year later in late 1982 and is much closer to the Lotus games, with 3D-looking sprite cars and actual turns you have to actually steer around.

I have to admit that I'd barely heard of the game before researching this article, which is weird because this was a big deal in its day. It was the highest-grossing arcade game in 1983 and the first video game ever to use 16-bit hardware. It's also got analogue steering and acceleration, high and low gears, and it runs at a slick 60 FPS. Plus the advert for the Atari 5200 version is amazing: YouTube link.

Here's another interesting bit of Pole Position trivia: if you so much as breathe on another car you're both going to explode in a massive fireball. Crash into any of the Pepsi billboards and you're also going to explode. It's actually kind of difficult to avoid exploding in this game. You don't have lives, but blowing the car up takes a few seconds to recover from, and you're not given much time to finish your lap.

Out Run (Arcade)

Okay, here's an arcade game that I had already heard about. In fact, I think everyone's heard of Sega's 1986 classic Out Run; it's maybe the most famous sprite racer ever made. It's got a genre of music named after it! Which is fitting I guess, as it was apparently the first arcade game to let you choose your tunes. It's also supposed to be the first arcade racer to feature hills and I can believe it. The technology to make this game work didn't exist at the time, so Sega had to create a second-generation Super Scalar arcade board for it.

Out Run is all about point-to-point races where you have to hit checkpoints before the time runs out, without hitting other vehicles or any of the scenery. Smashing into a wall will get you a beautiful animation of the Ferrari Testarossa flipping over and the occupants going flying, but the timer's so tight that if you're watching it you may have already lost and you just don't know it yet. Man, these arcade racers love their timers.

You'd think that home systems would lack the horsepower to run a cutting edge arcade title like this, but two years later the game was on basically everything. I'm going to boot up the Amiga version right now to see how that worked out.

Out Run (Amiga)

So, uh, is that 7 frames per second do you think?

I'm sure there are many reasons why this runs so badly, but the fact that it was apparently a port of the Atari ST version couldn't have helped. The Amiga 500 had a bunch of custom chips that made it a more capable gaming machine than the similar spec Atari ST, but games had to actually be designed to use them.

It wasn't long before there were dozens of these games on home systems, many of them coin-op conversions like Chase H.Q. and Super Hang-On, but what Amiga owners really needed was a game built from the ground up especially for Amiga hardware.

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1990 - LOTUS ESPRIT TURBO CHALLENGE
(AMIGA, ATARI ST, C64, ZX SPECTRUM, CPC)

Man, I love this game's theme. It's probably my favourite from the three games. The original Amiga version of it anyway; I don't like what replaces it on the CD32 version. This theme's so good that it was later reused for the Bordeaux track in the SNES racing game Top Gear (and it wasn't the only Lotus song to make a cameo).

Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge Theme (YouTube link)
Top Gear - Track 3 music (YouTube link)

The title screen's followed by a bit of a slideshow, and I'm going to go through all of it because a: it's the only time I'll get a chance, and b: the art is half the reason I'm writing about the games.

Those other sprite racers I've mentioned were limited to just one car and that's still true here. This first Lotus game is all about the beautiful Lotus Esprit Turbo SE, a descendant of the car that Roger Moore's James Bond famously drove into the ocean.

Here's a fun Lotus Esprit fact for you: in 2004 it was one of the only cars left in production with those awesome retractable pop-up headlights. A few months later, pop-up headlights finally went extinct. At least they'll always exist in my GIF.

Personally, I've always thought that the Esprit looks a bit like a Ferrari F355 from the side and that's about as technical as I'm interested in getting when it comes to comparing the cars. I've never once tried reading any of these stats that come up.

Incidentally, there's an arcade game called F355 Challenge, but it's not a challenge where you drive a F355, it's a game where you drive a car called a F355 Challenge. Like how Esprite Turbo Challenge has you driving an Esprite Turbo SE.

This is a British game about a British car, so the steering wheel is on the right. This makes absolutely zero difference in-game as you drive on race tracks and you never see the dashboard, so this guide's just here to give the game some pretty imagery to cycle through while it's waiting for the player to press 'fire'. I like it though; it makes the game feel very professional. It's as if I'm flicking through a glossy booklet before getting started.

That 3D spinning car in particular is fascinating to me. It's definitely not real-time, not with those anti-aliased lines, so my best guess it that it was raytraced and then painted over.

The menu screen for the first Lotus isn't all that fancy looking, but at least it's not being cryptic.

This is an Amiga game, so it assumes you'll have a one-button digital joystick plugged in and if you pick 'alternative control' you can use that button to accelerate. No keyboard control for player 1, though it's an option for the second player. You can also switch to manual transmission and use up and down to switch gears, but that's always seemed pointless to me. I mean you might decide to slow down slightly on the trickier corners, but really the only time you'll need to touch those gears is when you hit a wall and need to get back up to speed again.

There are three difficulty modes, each with its own sets of tracks (I think). I'm playing on 'medium' so I'll be racing around 10 of them before I'm done. Or trying to anyway.

Starting a game brought me to the music select screen, cleverly disguised as the car stereo. Oh damn, it can load cassettes and CDs!

This Out Run-style soundtrack selector is a nice idea, so it's a shame you only see it once; you're stuck with the song you choose for every race in the championship. Also, the Amiga only has four sound channels and they've filled them all with music, so you have to turn the music off to hear sound effects properly. It does try to play a few sounds over the music, but whenever tyres are squealing or bumpers are colliding you lose the baseline. It's not ideal.

Alright, here's what Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge looks like:

That's a lot quicker than the port of Out Run! It's actually only running at 25 FPS on my PAL Amiga, but it feels slick and responsive. You might think they've made me play in 10:3 widescreen to keep the pace up, but player two would've had the bottom half of the screen if they were playing.

Also, it turns out that dodging cars is hard when you're racing against 19 other people. It's a bit crowded at the start, especially when I have to squeeze through a narrow gap between the cars and the piles of rocks someone's just left on the track.

There's not as much variation in the traffic here as there is in Out Run, there are no trucks driving by or anything like that, but then it's a race so that makes sense. Plus there's another big difference: I don't crash or explode if I hit anything!

Hey, I got first place! I can live with that.

It's not actually necessary to come first every time, as I just need to have the most points at the end of the 10 races to win. It's a nice system as it means you can keep playing after a failure in the hope that you'll turn it around. At least one player has to finish in the top 10 however, or you're both instantly disqualified.

Nice names, by the way.

Atari ST version

Here's the Atari ST version for comparison. It's a weaker machine than the Amiga 500 so they've had to make some compromises, like taking the '1' off my bumper! 

It's not as compromised as you might expect however. The graphics have been cut back a bit, it's less slick, and the music's a lot more '8-bit', but it's still pretty much as fun to play. Plus there's a recent fan-made Atari STE conversion that uses that machine's blitter coprocessor to close the gap a bit.

I'm approaching the final lap here, so right now I'm trying to decide whether I should make a pit stop and grab some fuel, or just go straight for the finish line. Pit stops take a few seconds as I have to come to a complete stop and wait for the fuel gauge to to fill up a bit, but at least it'll spare me from having to listen to the 'low fuel' beep for the whole last lap. Also, I won't run out of fuel and lose.

So the Amiga version is the best, the Atari version isn't bad, and then you've got the 8-bit versions...

ZX Spectrum version

The ZX Spectrum version of Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge was voted number 17 in the Your Sinclair Readers' Top 100 Games of All Time. That sounds good, but it puts it 16 places below a port of Chase H.Q.

It's not just the slow frame rate, primitive audio and monochrome colours that let the Spectrum version down, it's also the visibility. It's hard enough to see what you're doing at the best of times, but when you go down an incline the camera tilts right into the ground and when you climb up some other hill the camera shows nothing but sky. On the plus side, they remembered to put a '1' on my bumper this time, and I actually need it now because all the cars are the same colour (ie. whatever colour the road is).

The Amstrad CPC version is basically the same thing as this, except slower.

Commodore 64 version

Visibility isn't great in the C64 version of the game either. The camera's less wild on the hills but this really isn't Lotus' ideal form. Plus the limited graphics only make it more obvious that the other cars in Lotus 1 are just sliding from left to right and back again.

I always like it when I'm able to lap the other drivers like this though. Weaving through them gives me something to do while I'm driving around in the first place, plus it helps my opponents realise how terrible they are at driving! It's less fun when they start lapping me after I've suffered a chain of collisions while trying to navigate narrow paths full of these fat-ass cars.

A TON OF RACES LATER

Son of a bitch lying signs telling me to go right when there's a left turn coming up!

If you look closely this GIF is actually four clips edited together, as I made the same bloody mistake four laps in a row. In my defence, the game didn't give me any landmarks to remind me the deceitful signs were coming up again.

At least the GIF helps illustrate a couple of things, like if you keep hitting signs every lap you're going to be in 18th place. It also shows that hitting an obstacle takes off considerably more speed than hitting another car, but you don't go spinning off and explode. In fact, there's no damage in this at all.

Oh right, I needed to finish in the top 10 to continue. It's not a huge shock though, to be honest. I've never beaten the game, not even on easy mode. I got further than I did in Out Run though; bloody hell that game's tough.

Lotus 1 is all about driving laps and getting points, there aren't any other game modes. Though there is something else to do if you know the secret code...

The game features a hidden shoot 'em up called Rox! Asteroids keep falling down the screen, and you have to keep steering your spaceship around and shoot at them. When you finally collide with a rock you lose and it tells you how many you blew up. And that's it.

It's not the most sophisticated shooter I've ever seen, there's a reason it's a hidden sub-game within Lotus instead of the other way around, but it's... there. The game's also impressively slick and it's only moderately annoying that you have to keep tapping the fire button instead of holding it down. It's always fun to find a secret free gift inside a game. Or inside anything really. But I'm never going to play this again.

Anyway, that was Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge, maybe the most beloved racing game of 1990. On the Amiga anyway. But in 1991 there came a new challenger...

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ONE YEAR LATER - 1991

Formula One Grand Prix (Amiga)

In late 1991 we got the next revolutionary racing game from Geoff Crammond, creator of Revs and Stunt Car Racer and probably other stuff too: Formula One Grand Prix. Or World Circuit if you're in the US.

The game features real-time 3D polygon tracks and simulated car handling, so you can actually lose grip, spin around, and go the wrong way. It's not the first game of its kind, not by a long shot (aside from Crammond's earlier games, there was also Hard Drivin', Indianapolis 500 and so on), but this is just showing off. It even has a suggested driving line, wing mirrors, vehicle damage and assists!

It's amazing that Crammond got this running on a 7 MHz CPU. The trouble is, he didn't get it running fast. In high detail mode on a PAL Amiga 500 you'll get around 5 frames a second. Put the graphics down to lowest and that'll push it up to 8 FPS. That seems to be its maximum, even if you run it on a faster Amiga, so at best it's a third the speed of Lotus. Though PCs do better, matching Lotus' 25 FPS on a 486.

It was an impressive game in its day (Amiga Power rated it the 27th best Amiga game ever, while Lotus was way down the list in 67th place), but I can see why people were still drawn to speedy arcade sprite racers at this point. Also, it can take like 15 minutes to finish a race, not counting qualifying, which is a bit much!

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1991 - LOTUS TURBO CHALLENGE 2
(AMIGA, ATARI ST, ARCHIMEDES, MEGA DRIVE/GENESIS)

The second of the Lotus games came out a year after the original, for a very different set of machines. The Amiga remained the lead system and the Atari ST still got a port, but this time the Acorn Archimedes joined them and the 8-bit computers were left out entirely.

This was also the first of the series to make the leap to consoles, with the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis getting a version confusingly titled Lotus Turbo Challenge, without the number 2. Either way the word 'Esprit' has disappeared, as they've added a second car!

It's the Lotus Elan, and they've got it doing the headlight blinking like the Esprit did in the first game!

I prefer the first game's theme music, but Lotus 2's theme is still pretty legendary. And not just for the fact that it's got a secret subliminal message saying "You will not copy this game," hidden in it.

Lotus Turbo Challenge II Theme (YouTube link).

Plus it says here on Wikipedia that the hi-hat and voice sample is taken from Yello's Oh Yeah, featured in the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Man, how did I never notice that? Seriously, I should have noticed that.

If you've ever wanted to know the dimensions of a Lotus Elan SE, you're in luck, and the game's even thrown in some pixel-art pictures of the interior.

It doesn't however mention that the colour is called 'Norfolk Mustard Yellow', or that the Elan is front-wheel drive, in contrast to the real-wheel drive Esprit. To be honest, I never noticed a difference in how the two cars handle in-game.

The classic Esprit Turbo SE also returns, along with some familiar artwork. They didn't just reuse the same pictures from the slideshow in the first game though, this has all been scaled down and repixelled. You can't just resize pixel art, even when it's been based on a photo, so there was probably a bit of work put into this.

Here's the second game's options screen, now featuring pictures! The Amiga never had an official joystick (to my knowledge) so it seems like they've gone with the popular Competition Pro stick for the icon. Personally, I prefer a Zipstick, due to... hang on, that's not an Amiga keyboard! Amigas have arrow keys.

Anyway, the options are pretty similar to the first Lotus, except with two big additions: system link and passwords. They've taken away difficulty modes though, and they've also taken away the car stereo, so there's no in-game music! It could make it a good podcast game I guess.

System link seems like a nice feature if you've got a friend with their own system and another copy of the game, as you connect them up with a null modem cable and both play full screen. But the secret power contained within this feature is that it works with split-screen as well, so you can have four players at once! Sadly there is no system link on systems like the Mega Drive or CD32.

One big change from the original Lotus is that it's no longer about racing against cars around circuits. Now it's all about racing against the clock down public roads, hitting checkpoints along the way. All the races are point-to-point and there's no need to refuel or overtake anyone. Well, except for the other players.

There are only eight tracks now, which seems like a huge step down from the original, but they're a lot more varied now. Like level one takes place in a forest, level two takes place at night... I've forgotten the rest.

Another thing that's different to the first game: the game fills the whole screen now. Well, kind of. The action still mostly fits into the same slice, with the top half being all sky most of the time.

One of the tricks I remember is that driving into logs is often the smart thing to do. That's because they're actually ramps in disguise. Fight your instincts and hit a log lying in front of a river and you'll leap right over it without slowing down! This is useful because you really don't want to slow down in this game.

The game doesn't penalise you as much for hitting cars and walls, you lose something like 15% of your speed instead of 40-90%, but it makes up for it by having extremely tight time limits. Plus you can't screw up in a few races and make it up later, now you have to be awesome all the time.

Mega Drive/Genesis

I decided to give the console version a try and something seems a little wrong here. I'm not talking about the symmetrical tree or the car's missing exhaust pipe, though that is a bit weird, I'm talking about the resolution. The Mega Drive usually outputs 320-pixel wide images, the same as low res Amiga and MS-DOS modes, but they've used a smaller resolution instead so everything appears stretched on a TV. Also, all the cars have been redrawn to be smaller and the game's just less impressive in general. Visually and aurally. Even the frame rate is worse.

The Amiga 500 had some power under the hood for its time, but the Mega Drive usually wins in a head-to-head contest like this so it's strange to see the Amiga take the lead.

Mega Drive/Genesis

One thing the Mega Drive version has over all the other versions is that it's got a map of each track! The game seems way harder though, as I could only make it halfway through the first race before the clock ran out.

This is the only time I've ever seen a map in a Lotus game. It's also the only time I've gotten to see how far through a level I've gotten in Lotus 2. The first and third games both have little bars on the HUD to show your progress, but Lotus 2 doesn't.

LATER, ON TRACK 3

One thing I appreciate about this game is that running out of time isn't an instant failure. The engine cuts out, but it takes the car a little while to come to a halt and if you roll over the checkpoint you get your time refill! It's so satisfying to just make it over the line and find that you're back in the race. You do have to make it all the way to that line, however.

This fog is something new, by the way. Lotus 2 introduces weather conditions which can affect gameplay, like by reducing visibility. I don't actually know much about the other kinds of weather though, as to be honest this is as far as I've gotten in the game.

The game's actually kind of difficult! For me anyway; I know some people can breeze through it in 40 minutes, including loading times. In fact you pretty much have to, as the checkpoints force you to complete each course within a strict time limit.

Annoyingly it won't just let me continue where I left off, not quickly anyway. I have to go back to the menu and put in the password it gave me. In two-player, both people can keep going as long as one of them reaches the end, though this does mean if a player falls short of a checkpoint they'll be left waiting until the race is over.

I used a password to quickly skip ahead to the last level as I wanted to mention that they've added these red turbo power-ups! They're not in any other course, they only appear here. Though the penultimate race does have green time bonus pickups. It's kind of weird for a game that's otherwise fairly realistic.

This storm is great, by the way. There's rain, water coming off the tires, flashes of lightning. It's all very atmospheric. I'd show off how it looks on the Amiga CD32 version, but there's no point. They didn't bother to improve the graphics one bit as far as I can tell. It's the same. Speaking of things that haven't changed much, the Esprit sprite is basically the same as in the last game, except with the shine removed... along with the driver's head. You don't get to pick your car, by the way, they alternate each course.

Overall, I'd say that this is a much closer contest this time, but the Amiga 500 version of Lotus 2 is still the best. In fact, arguably the best arcade racing game on the system and it's objectively among the slickest. Plus I'm giving it bonus points for the voice samples you get when you start the race or hit a checkpoint. "Marks. Set. Go!"

Lotus 2 also has a secret game. This time it's a shooting gallery game called Dux where you have to shoot ducks (and other things). The catch is that you have finite ammo, so you also have to hit the green numbers for a refill. Also, everything's moving and it's tricky to get the timing right so that the bullet intersects with the right target at the right time. And there's a time limit.

The trouble with Dux is that its music was torn right out of your worst nightmares. I mean there's nothing wrong with the song, it's Sobre las Olas by Juventino Rosas, which has made appearances in many circuses and Looney Tunes cartoons, it's just that the instruments they've used are an assault on my ears.

The game itself is also a cover, as it's based on a game that programmer Shaun Southern made for the VIC-20 called Kwazy Kwacks... that was ripping off an old Sega arcade game from 1980 called Carnival. (It's more obvious in the arcade game that what you're controlling at the bottom of the screen is supposed to be a gun.)

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ONE YEAR LATER - 1992

Jaguar XJ220 (Amiga)

There were always a million of these sprite racing games on the Amiga, but after 1991 something changed: they all got compared to Lotus 2. The two games that stood out the most in its immediate aftermath were Jaguar XJ220 and Crazy Cars III, so I figured I'd take a look at what the competition was like on the Lotus series' home turf.

Right away you can see something different: there are other kinds of cars in the game! Also, those harsh black outlines give the cars a bit of a cartoony look and I'm not sure what's going on with those hills. I noticed another difference after a couple of minutes of driving: you can get so far separated from the other cars that you're left alone on an empty road. That just doesn't happen in the Lotus games; they're always giving you stuff to dodge to make sure you're awake.

When a simple game has a thousand clones the big question is 'Why should I buy another one when the one I've got is fine?' Jaguar XJ220's answer to that is...

Jaguar XJ220 (Amiga)

... a track editor! The Lotus games don't have one of these. Well, not exactly.

The editor lets you put a track down one piece at a time, setting the curve along with what scenery's on either side of the road, before moving on to the next piece. It seems like it'd take bloody ages to make anything with it, but it does get the job done.

Another feature the game has is that you have to pay for repairs. I can live without it.

Crazy Cars III (Amiga)

Crazy Cars III came out a few months later and showed off just how orange a racing game could look.

Lotus's approach was to keep things simple, but Crazy Cars III gives you a lot to think about. You can make bets with the other drivers before a race, there's damage and cops to worry about, you choose races from a map of the US and work to complete each division, and you can even upgrade your car. In Lotus you can't make your car better, you can only make yourself better. Theoretically. Hasn't worked out for me yet.

What's weird about the game is that was rereleased a couple of years later with a new name... and a two-player option! How did they not think two-player was important the first time around? Also, the new name was Lamborghini American Challenge, because if you can't beat 'em, steal 33% of their title.

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1992 - LOTUS III: THE ULTIMATE CHALLENGE
(AMIGA, ATARI ST, MS-DOS, MEGA DRIVE/GENESIS)

It wasn't long before Lotus returned to take on the challengers to its throne. But it's not it's not a Turbo Challenge anymore, it's the Ultimate Challenge. The game is so epic that they've also switched from a number to Roman numerals.

The series returned to the Mega Drive/Genesis under the name Lotus II: RECS, and finally made its way to DOS PCs with the name Lotus: The Ultimate Challenge. So this game is Lotus 1, Lotus 2 and Lotus 3, depending on who you ask.

There was still no SNES port for whatever reasons, but the game's publisher, Gremlin Graphics, developed a new sprite racer series called Top Gear for the console. The two series don't really share any developer credits, Lotus was made by Magnetic Fields, but they do share a composer... and a bunch of music. 

This time there's a bit of an animation at the start with the new car driving up to the camera until the Lotus badge fills the screen. No headlight flashing this time, sadly, as it doesn't have pop-up lights.

The menu's looking a lot more crowded now. Though the system link multiplayer feature is gone, weirdly.

Lotus 3 was intended to give both Lotus 1 fans and Lotus 2 fans a sequel they could enjoy, so the game features the first game's Championship Mode, with circuits, opponents and fuel, and the second game's Arcade Mode with timed checkpoints. This was great news for Sega owners who had missed out on the first game entirely. Difficulty modes are back as well, to let new players cruise through some easy races before having their spirits crushed by a difficulty spike on the last track.

But the game's big new feature, its entire justification to exist in a world with Jaguar XJ220, Crazy Cars III and Lotus 2 in it, is RECS.

RECS let you auto-generate new tracks by moving a series of sliders, giving you the power to create almost infinite (not really) variations! The advantage of this system over something like Jaguar XJ200's editor is that it's extremely fast and if you want to share levels with other people all you need is the password. It works on other systems as well, so you could make a level on the DOS game and play it on the Mega Drive. Or you can just type in words as the code and see what it gives you.

Unfortunately, it's missing the 'track editor' functionality that other track editors possess, so it's not going to let you express your creativity, or experience anything designed by a human. Worse, all the game levels have RECS codes too, so it certainly seems like the entire game was generated using this tool.

On the plus side, it's got all eight of Lotus 2's level themes plus five more, so it's not just a procedurally-generated retread of old content.

Hey, the car stereo's back and it's gotten a bit of an upgrade so now there's a graphic equaliser that I can't play with. Looks good though. 

This time composer Barry Leitch has been replaced by Patrick Phelan, who brings his own style to the soundtrack... and a catchy tune from the platform game Zool. Here are some YouTube links if you want to compare, or just listen to it.

Lotus III: The Ultimate Challenge - Spaceninja
Zool: Ninja of the ''Nth'' Dimension - Sunset Mix

Unlike Lotus 1, I can choose either music or sound effects, there's no mix of the two. The weird thing is, this is true for the Mega Drive version as well. Console games almost never make you pick one or the other. Jokes on them though, I'm from the future so I can just play the soundtrack on YouTube while I'm racing.

I hope you're not bored of looking at pictures of cars yet as it's actually giving me the option to pick my vehicle this time! The Lotus Elan SE page features the same familiar art, redrawn to be even smaller. Reused art is the theme of the game I expect. The spinning car has returned as well, also smaller, and much less shiny

Here's what Lotus 3's new green car looks like:

It's the Lotus M200 concept car, which looks almost exactly like the Elan! So that saved them from having to do much work on the sprite.

And finally, there's the classic red Lotus Esprit that's been with the series from the start.

DOS version

Huh? The DOS version of the game has a purple Esprit S4 instead of the red Esprit Turbo SE? I am genuinely surprised. They even bothered to update the spinning model to change the spoiler on the back!

The other versions of the game still have the old red car instead though. Because it's awesome. Though the purple version is 1 mile per hour faster, so I'm looking forward to giving it a try.

Oh damn, this track is a motorway with traffic coming the other way and trucks crossing the road! It's nothing new to the series, there was a level like this in Lotus 2 as well, but I never got that far so it's new to me! Of course, all the traffic is still other Lotuses.

You might have noticed that the GIF up isn't quite as slick as the other ones. On a 50hz PAL machine, the game runs closer to 20 frames a second instead of 25, so you're getting uneven frames. It's not ideal.

I've noticed that the biggest complaints about the game seem to be the frame rate and this sci-fi track. It has magnets pulling you over, turbo zones, and random lasers, which are all things Lotus owners didn't typically encounter in 1992. It ruins the fantasy a bit.

Other levels also have things that affect the car, like wind blowing you to the side. It's like regular racing, except more awkward!

This is cool though. That's a valiant attempt to make a cliff wall with scaled sprites. Also you've got some real-time drawn fence lines there on the left. These were good graphics for a home machine in 1992.

It's kind of hypnotic though, driving 10 laps of this track with music on instead of sound effects. It's actually sending me to sleep a bit, which is a problem that Lotus 2 didn't have.

Overall, the game feels like an expansion pack to the second game, adding more content without really changing the core gameplay... much. You still barely lose any speed for collisions and then end up running out of time anyway, it's still about pure racing without money, upgrades or cops being involved at all, and you can still jump over logs.

I think this lack of evolution may be one of the reasons that Amiga owners don't generally rate this as their favourite of the trilogy. It's more of the same. Though I believe that it's mostly because the game's just a little too much for the Amiga 500 hardware. It's pretty responsive and fairly slick, but compared to Lotus 2 that's not good enough. People were used to better. Run it on a more powerful machine like the CD32 however, and the frame rate problem's solved.

The final secret game is Pod, based on Shaun Southern's C64 game P.O.D.: Proof of Destruction, released 7 years earlier. You control a little grey orb which shoots creatures sliding all over this grid. The orb can slide around all over it too, but I never found a reason to leave the bottom row.

There are some interesting ideas in the game, like the way destroying things temporarily damages the grid and how the different enemy behaviours make things trickier when there's two types around at once, but this didn't hold my attention at all, to be honest.

Plus it has one big problem: everything on screen is more visible than the enemy bullets. In fact, I didn't even realise that they were bullets at first, I just assumed they were shrapnel falling down. They're those tiny grey dots and they're not any easier to spot when they're moving. I had to rely on the sound effect to let me know that they'd been fired. Though despite the inconspicuous bullets I actually found this to be incredibly easy. I was earning more lives than I was losing so I eventually just had to quit.

So what racing games were Nintendo owners playing in 1992, if the Lotus games never made it to the SNES?

Super Mario Kart (SNES)

Oh, right.

The SNES's distinctive Mode 7 was a clever new trick that made regular sprite racers feel a bit antiquated by comparison. Sprite racers give the illusion that you're driving around corners, but in Super Mario Kart you actually have to do it for real. Plus you can even turn the car around and go the other way!

Top Gear (SNES)

Plus I've already mentioned Top Gear a bunch of times. It's a bit like Lotus 1, with laps and fuel and races where you finish in 17th place.

The SNES and Mega Drive/Genesis were as bad or worse than the Amiga when it came to full 3D polygon racing games like Formula One Grand Prix, they just weren't built to push polygons. But developers started adding processors to the game cartridges to make them capable of games like Stunt Race FX and Virtua Racing.

Arcades were still a step ahead however, giving people a glimpse of what was coming the day after tomorrow.

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ONE YEAR LATER - 1993

Daytona USA (Arcade)

In 1993, arcade games like Daytona USA and Ridge Racer featured fast texture-mapped 3D graphics, far beyond anything Formula One Grand Prix could boast.

Need for Speed brought these graphics to people's homes in 1994, and it was followed by PlayStation games like Destruction Derby and Wipeout the following year. The era of the sprite racer had reached its end. In fact, the era of sprites had reached its end. Well, on PCs and consoles anyway; handhelds were their own world.

The thing is, after reading some of the magazines from the time, I get the feeling that people (Amiga owners at least) were actually ready for Out Run-style racing games to be over. What was the point in making more of them when they'd just be inferior clones of Lotus 2?

So I suppose the Lotus games probably deserve a star:


If I was going to recommend someone a 16-bit sprite racing game, it'd be one of these three, and I think there's still fun to be found in the genre even if you're more used to cars having actual physics and opponents having any kind of AI whatsoever. Sometimes it's enough to go fast and dodge stuff.

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Thanks for reading all/some of that. If you want to read more words then come back in a month or so and I should have something new for you. If you stare at that tiny clue on the left long enough you might be able to figure out what it is, and then you'll have the privilege of spoiling the mystery for everyone else down in the comments.

It'd also be awesome if you shared your own thoughts about the Lotus games, other sprite racers, etc.