Monaco means sun, sea, expensive yachts and for one day a year, cars. Not your ordinary, average Porsche or Ferrari but real cars, the F1 brigade. There was an incredible coin-op that allowed everyone to race that magical street circuit through the Principality. US Gold have now tried to squeeze this immense beast's racing power and graphics onto a single disk.

The conversion exhibits a different structure to its coin-op parent. Incredibly, it actually sports more tracks and a longer game. The plot is simple, starting I France you first qualify, then race. If you finish high enough you move onto Brazil and go through much the same procedure. Following this is Spain, and if you're still going when the chequered flag falls there, it's 'Monaco I up' for a race in the dry and then a final showdown in the rain.

Drivers have three driving options - automatic, four cog and seven gear machine. Ultimate victory is only feasible however, for drivers who risk the seven-gear nightmare. Keeping the revs high and the gear low lets your engine brake in corners, gaining enough traction to hold on in even the evilest hairpin. And hairpins are what Monaco is famous for.

Monte Carlo or bust
Qualifying isn't easy, but racing is where the real game starts. You must weave around the twisting courses, anticipating corners, using the rear-view mirror to out drive the computer cars who want your place. Contact with other cars isn't fatal but they cost time. However, if one of the computer drives nudge you on a corner - or you just screw it up - and a barrier is hit at speed, all your hard qualifying is wrecked as the front strut snaps.

Exits of this sort are gutting, but become all too familiar as your racing experience grows. Not all collisions are fatal, slow ones just kill speed and ruin your line, but the faster you drive, the greater the risk.

Senna prod's
Super Monaco GP is fast, wickedly fast, which is a factor that no race game can live without. Roadside objects flash past and corners exhibit a suddenness that is matched only by their tightness. The computer cars are generous when it comes to overtaking - apart from the Sennaesque nudges from behind - and this makes real racing possible.

Super Monaco is a test of concentration as much as race skill. Three continuous laps need to be finished if you're to win through the qualifiers, and this ain't easy even when the track is clear. When you have to calculate how to pass a fast opponent as well, life becomes difficult.

Super Monaco is incredibly frustrating, and not in a particularly fun fashion. With one crash terminating the whole campaign for the Monaco crown, winning demands

Razor's edge
The gameplay balances on a razor edge, those with quick enough mouse control will reach Monaco without a nick, normal mortals will be cut to pieces by frustration before they reach Spain. The different gear boxes provide a learning curve which the player can follow while grasping the racing ropes.

Yet, even in France, finishing high enough to qualify for Brazil is nigh on impossible with an automatic gear-shift. The carrot of real racing success is dangled at great distance. With the fragility of the motor, as well as the power deficiency of both auto and four-gear models, Monaco is a game for the very determined or very quick.

The difficulty factor aside however, Super Monaco is a faithful reproduction of the original. The new tracks feel right, with the right blend of straight and vicious bends. The game has all the sundry screens faithfully reproduced to wrap the package neatly. Even the intro jingle has that authentically jarring arcade ring to it.

Yet, for all this accuracy, Super Monaco will disappoint anyone but die hard fans of the coin-op. Its relative shortness and difficulty means that good players will see the end of the game display quickly, while average drivers will spend many hours sprackling themselves on a French hairspin.

Super Monaco is a good conversion of an awkward arcade, and even to get a faithful replica of it - let alone an improved version - is something of an achievement. Achievements however, do not always make cor classic computer entertainment.

When it comes to producing race games, ex-Activision coder, ZZKJ, is miles ahead of the field. Zach first came to the fore when he wrote Electric Dream's superb Super Hang-On convesion, and his next task was to cram Powerdrift's sprite shifting system into the Amiga - and, despite the slow gameplay, there's no doubting that Powerdrift was a technically brilliant conversion.

Naturally enough, when Probe were drafted in to produce a conversion of Sega's graphically stunning Super Monaco GP coin-op, ZZKJ was the first choice to code it. And, to his credit, he has turned in a conversion which plays every bit as well as its arcade parent.

Using either the mouse or joystick, the game revolves around completing a number of European circuits ensuring that you stay ahead of a predetermined number of racers. Fans of the coin-op will note that, whereas the coin-op was based around the Monaco track, Probe have drawn ideas from the superb MegaDrive version and added Brazilian, French, and German tracks.

This serves to add more variety to the game, and also adds a number of new backdrops and twists and turns to the track. The race is viewed from the driver's seat, and the basic view of the track is surrounded by a rear-view mirror and an enlarged speedo.

Once the game has loaded, the player can choose from one or two manually-geared engines or an automatic - although newcomers to the world of Formula One racing would be advised to select the latter. In addition, as with Powerdrift and Super Hang-On, ZZKJ has also incorporated a set of parameters so that the sensitivity of the mouse controls can be altered, allowing for those with limited mouse room.

Once the controls have been selected, a qualifying lap must be completed to determine your position on the starting grid. Of the control systems offered, the mouse is by far the most responsive, especially when coupled with the automatic gear system. Using this method, the left button is sued to floor the accelerator, whilst the left and right directionals are used to steer the vehicle. At top speed, your car can reach 297mph, and the backdrop graphics - which are clear and well drawn, if a little two-dimensional - scroll past smoothly.

However, one small quirk I had noticed was that the trees and buildings that line the route often appear to scroll in the wrong direction, only to rectify the problem a few seconds later. These roadside objects, along with the oppositions' cars, should be avoided at all costs as contact with them slows the car down and wastes valuable time.

Similarly, should the car career into them at speed, assorted parts of the bonnet and wheels will be thrown into the air, writing the car off and effectively ending the game - as does failing to stay within a predetermined number of qualifiers.

The Super Monaco coin-op was a show piece of Sega's superb sprite-shifting software, with stunningly fast screen update and an addictive game, all housed within an impressive-looking cabinet. Even without the steering wheel and assorted cabinet details, U.S. Gold's conversion is first rate, with ZZKJ capturing the detail and speed of the arcade machine without any loss of speed.

Graphically, the game is about as close as you are likely to get, and both the road-side objects and the opposing cars depicted by large sprites which get chunkier as they pass - a definite acknowledging nod towards Sega's system, methinks, and one that adds authenticity to the conversion.

Unlike most others of the genre, Monaco doesn't suffer from a repetition, as the tracks are challenging without veering into the realms of impossibility, and number of tracks and their variety of corners and pitfalls will ensure that the game's lasting appeal is maintained. In all, an extremely close and playable conversion, and a round of applause to all those involved.

Monaco, eh? What a posh place. It's nearly always sunny, everyone's 'chic' and money flows like water. Makes you sick really - surely nowhere can be that perfect. Well, the good news is that there is actually some bad news regarding Monaco. It's not quite so brilliant after all. It's situated next to a gigantic toilet, you see - a toilet called the Mediterranean Ocean.

The Monaco Grand Prix therefore takes place right next to one of the largest sewage dumps in the world. So, next time you're sitting in front of the telly, listening to Murray Walker blithering on about how, uncannily, Alain Prost has just managed to overtake himself for the third time, remember one thing - those rich 'jet-setters' (the ones sprawled about all over the decks of their yachts) the cameras pan across every lap. Are they in paradise? No, not quite: they're surrounded by bobbing jobbies, floaters, or whatever you like to call them. Too much champagne, one little slip on a wet deck and shazam! From Nirvana to Hell in one fell swoop - with a series of tetanus injections just around the corner. So there is justice after all.

But was Super Monaco Grand Prix anything to do with water-borne excreta? Er, not really, no, so let's get back to the point. The Super Monaco GP coin-op was really something special. Vast chunks of roadside detail were whipped around at breakneck speed as you battled against 15 other formula-one cars to complete three laps of the tortuous course.

Hairpins came at you at speeds of 200 mph. Chicanes came at you at speeds of 200 mph. In fact virtually everything came at you at speeds of 200 mph, which is why most people had crashed at the end of lap one and were forced to feed the machine with another 50p piece so they could have another go,

Apart from the size of the sprites and the speeds at which they were thrown about, there was one other thing that made this game stand out from the crowd. This was the use of a rear view mirror - a massive one that stretched across the whole top fifth of the screen. You could see back for quite a distance and count the cars on your tail. You could see them getting bigger - a cunning visual clue that meant they were getting closer - but as you were often heading into a tight bend, acceleration was out of the window: and blocking tactics were called into play.

If a car was trying to slip past you on the left as you were approaching a hairpin right, you could take the corner wide and carve him up. If he hit you rear end, you'd both sustain damage, but he'd come off the worst and disappear from view in a cloud of smoke. Just like real racing driving, the idea was to keep one eye on the road in front and one eye on the action behind.

As you climbed up the position board, far from becoming less frenetic, the game kept pace by setting you a 'target'. If, for instance, you had grabbed 6th place, a message would pop up on screen telling you that you mustn't drop below 9th if you wanted to stay in the race.

And lots of scary loud beeping screamed out to remind you of this fact whenever another car got within ten lengths. This forced your attention back to the mirror: get passed by three more cars and that was it. It was the kind of pressure guaranteed to stuff up an up till excellent performance. And the better you were doing, the more punishing your target. Getting to 1st or so meant you had to remain there or be disqualified - a bit of a side-step from the real thing, but it certainly kept you on your toes.

But that, in a nutshell, was the Super Monaco Grand Prix coin-op. Superlative graphics combined with frenetic action. Not a great deal of longevity, as there were only three laps to go through - but despite this it was one of those arcade machines that got surrounded by crowds of people, all waving their one pound note and shouting "Me next!". Fights were not uncommon. So how has the action transformed to 16-bit restricted memory home computers? Read on, clot.

Dunc: Well, well, well. This is a turn up for the books. When I heard that Super Monaco Grand Prix was coming out on 16-bit, I thought "Blimey, that's going to be crap!". I was expecting a frame update of somewhere about the eight per minute mark - given the amount of trackside scenery bitmaps that would have to be shifted around. But fortunately I was wrong.

The game really does fly towards you smoothly. However, that's because the scenery's been reduced a bit. But that doesn't mean that it's sparse. Far from it. Tall buildings, trees, lamp-posts, piles of tyres and road direction signs come hacking at you thirteen to the dozen.

But enough about the animation, what about the game itself? After all, what works in an amusement arcade doesn't necessarily work on a home computer. Take Hard Drivin' for instance - two tracks and a time limit. Finish both and that's it, no incentive to return. So Super Monaco's single track was going to be much of the same. Guess what though? The computer game version is different in this respect. There isn't just the one course, there are four of them, and as you have to race over each of these twice (once in dry conditions and once in wet conditions) you can sort of read eight courses (seeing as the handling of the car is quite different in the wet).

To get to race at Monaco, you've got to first of all get good placings on the three previous tracks. First off (after choosing automatic transmission, four speed or seven speed) you get your preliminary race, of about half a lap, which is just you on your own against the clock. This determines your grid position (from one to sixteen). Then it's 'ready, steady go' time as you try to become number one.

The action's the same as the coin-op, with you checking your mirror with one eye to determine whether or not you need to do some carving up while your other eye scans the road ahead - however, the mirror in the US gold conversion seems to have lost some of its prominence, becoming more the size of your standard car rear view mirror. I personally preferred it big, but there you go.

The backdrops aren't as stunning as the original either, although they're quite pretty as far as racing games of this genre generally go. Something else that's missing is the 'course-map' on screen as you race - you can't tell how far in front of you the leader is. Again though, this doesn't really matter that much, so no probs.

So, we get to the meaty bit. How crap/brill is the game? Well, as conversions go, the Amiga version of Super Monaco is pretty accurate to the original, and at the end of the day really rather good - although somehow, somewhere, a little bit of the 'sense of urgency' has gone walkabout - and even with the four courses the longevity is questionably, but the game should be great fun while it lasts. Not the racing game to end all racing games, but not the worst on the market by any standard.

Dunc: The ST version of the game is different to the Amiga in exactly the way you'd expect: less colour and sound, but as you're used to the ST palette and sound chip this shouldn't really bother you at all. There is one other difference, however, and that's the roadside graphics - on the Amiga the buildings are quite tall. On the ST they're a bit shorter. Who cares?

Monaco has to be the most glamorous and exciting Grand Prix race, dropping a gaggle of 200mph speed machines on the streets of Monte Carlo. It's incredibly dangerous, noisy and absolutely exhausting for the world's best drivers but who could resist taking part? While waiting to be turned into sliced beef on a nasty hairpin turn you could take a stroll along those famous golden beaches, lose a year's wages in the exclusive casinos and maybe even chat up a princess. And what better incentive to risk your life could you want than the chance to meet Princess Stephanie, with her hip-cut designer swimsuits, sultry eyes, dangerous attitude and big, uhm, shoulders? It sure beats Brands Hatch with the rain, hot dogs and Fergie falling off her limo!

In the original coin-op you were plucked off the streets to swap your jeans for an asbestos suit and a ticket to Monaco. But for the home computer market this is all too easy - before getting your chance to become an international playboy you must prove yourself on three other tracks: France, Brazil and Spain. On all the tracks you must do a qualification lap to determine which position you start at.

The computer will decide at random whether conditions are wet or dry. Once in the three-lap race you have to beat some peculiar qualification rules. With each lap you make, you have to be in goes up one: if you're not in that position as you cross the finish line you're removed from the race - game over.

Before you can accelerate yourself into oblivion you must decide how quickly you're going to do it. There are three car transmissions to choose from: Beginner's Automatic (Low skill level with a low top speed to match), Intermediate 4-Gear System (Medium skill level with faster acceleration and slightly higher top speed) and the awesome Professional 7-Gear System (High skill level with a monster engine and a hair-raising top speed of 200+ mph). Needless to say, if you hit any roadside object at speed you disappear in a ball of flame! It's death or glory on the asphalt with just a single life, but you can't play cautious when you're aiming to impress a Princess!