If there's one mainstay that Gremlin Graphics is famous for, it has to be the racing game. Supercars, Lotus, Nigel Mansell and others have always been the secret to their success.

Most people thought that Lotus 2 and 3 were the definitive Amiga racing games and even Core Design's superb Jaguar XJ220 couldn't topple the Sheffield racers from the top of the pile. Which is why I find it so interesting that they should feel the need to convert a SNES racing game, and not a particularly good one at that, to the Amiga. Still, my lot isn't to reason why. (You're right, it's to get on with the review! - Ed)

STANDARD START
As you may have guessed, Top Gear 2 is a racing game, and to be honest it's a pretty standard one at that. You simply have to race around the world in a league against 19 other drivers, through various weather conditions, with the aim of coming first every time. Naturally, you car goes faster than all the others, yet it seems to have a far harder time actually completing a lap of any given course than the other drivers on the road. Sounds familiar?

As well as receiving championship points at the end of each race, you also receive an amount of money reflecting your final position. This cash is accumulated over a number of races, and can be spent before each one on adjustments and improvements to your car.

For example, you can soup up the engine, or add better tyres (or Wet Tyres for races in the rain), and if you like you can even give your car a respray, free of charge, for those of you who don't like the default colours or just fancy a shocking pink race car.

There are three levels for each upgrade and as usual the best costs the most. As you can probably tell by now, this game isn't exactly packed full of surprises.

HINDSIGHT
Playing this game, you realise what it was that made the Lotus trilogy as popular as they were - smooth animation and a nice, solid and responsive feel to the car. Although the updated of the track and objects is running in a frame most of the time (it comes down to about three frames when rain or any conditions are overlaid onto the screen), the game just doesn't look anywhere near as smooth as it predecessors.

This is really down to the fact that the scaling on all cars is terrible. You are given no real sense of distance or perspective simply because the competition go from being the same size as your automobile to dots on the horizon in about five steps, which just isn't acceptable these days.

Also, the game just doesn't feel right. The car is quite slow to respond most of the time, and you end up fighting the controls more often than not, where you should actually be in tune with the game itself. I know it might sound like a load of hippy nonsense, but the key to this kind of game is when you forget about how you're controlling the game and just play it intuitively, er, use the force as it were.

At the end of the day, Top Gear 2 is a real let down. It's a adequate racing game, with no frills, but it really just does not match up to Gremlin's glorious past. For those of you who have never played a racing game before it's worth a look. If, however, you've already played games such as Lotus or Jaguar XJ220 - avoid.

When I first heard that Top Gear 2 was being produced for the A1200, I could hardly wait. After all, it's a Gremlin release and they've got a track record second to none with their racing games. But what a major disappointment when I started laying it. There are so many downers about the game that the best aproach is to cover all the foibles and irritations.

The first irritation is that Top Gear 2 is a direct conversion from the Super Nintendo. The only notable difference between the A1200 Top Gear 2 and the SNES's is that you can drive a second car using the keyboard if you opt to play a two-player game using the familiar split-screen arrangement. Note that you can sue the keyboard for control. Command on this will be made late on.

Jauntily-paced
Now, I don't subscribe to the 'my computer's better than yours' school of thought. But the A1200 deserves a racing game that's going to stretch it a bit more than this. It's not that it's not pretty, it is. It's not that it plays like a dog, it doesn't. It's just that Top Gear 2 doesn't offer anything new to racing games.

Even more unforgivable is the fact that it's aimed at a young console market not used to jauntily-paced racing games, or 32-bit machines with keyboards.

As a prime example of shortsightedness, take the front end and the entry of player names. You have to enter letters and numbers using the joystick. This method of entry is tedious, especially when you consider that the A1200 has a whopping great keyboard. Make a mistake and you have to move the cursor all the way over to the delete icon, press the fire button and then locate the letter that you wanted to enter in the first place.

If you think that I'm going a bit overboard about this, consider the following. The game is played over 16 cities, each city boasts four tracks, giving a total of 64 tracks. Every city can be accessed using a password. The following is the password to one of the cities (find out for yourself which), VNJ9, [53[, [MPR, HI[]], WRQ$$. With a keyboard input, this would be acceptable, if not a bit quirky. With joystick it's bloody annoying.

Lonely road
And there's more. If you select a one-player game you're stuck with it unless you reset the machine. No recourse to the option screen to select a two-player game exists. This may be acceptable to SNES owners, but I'm afraid I expect a bit more.

Other detracting quirks are the omission of a pause option. You never know, your cook, thief, wife, lover may request your presence during play. Considering that progress to the next race depends qualifying in the top 10 and a that a interruption may thwart that progress, this is an unforgivable oversight. On the SNES you can pause the game from the joypad whenever you want. So why can't A1200 owners?

As for the game itself, it's no great shakes. Imagine Lotus 2 with bigger car and less landmarking scenery, racing over a circuit rather than trying to reach stages. That just about covers it.

The lack of any significant landmarks, other than the occasional set of barriers, imparts a generic feel to every circuit, so there's not character whatsoever to any particular track.

It's no great loss though. With good racing games you should have to learn every curve and bend, or at least the difficult ones. Due to the driving mechanics of Top Gear 2, learning the tracks isn't all that important a part of the winning equation - on my first couple of plays at championship level 1 zoomed through the first seven cities (28 tracks) with little concentration.

And that's not all that's poor about the driving mechanics. The actual view from the track is limiting too. The driver's apex - the spot that drivers focus on to anticipate the road and upcoming events - is too short. You can't anticipate the appearance of the other cars until they're just about on top of you. This is a real problem.

Funny stuff
This problem is compounded by the speech bubbles - one of the gimmicks intended to inject some humour into the affair. That's right, when you pass another car, hit another car, kick in your nitros or whatever, a little Americanized platitude appears in a bubble, directly blocking the driver's apex.

Favourites are: crash 'n' burn, you dude, loser and road hog. They block your view and lead to all sorts of problems. They might appeal to the console set, but they seem decidedly out of place on the A1200. Different strokes for different folks I suppose.

Top Gear 2 is a disappointment. It offers minimal driving skill gameplay. The reward for qualifying to the next race is pathetic. The sonics are abysmal and overall there's nothing that elevates this offering above a crowd of similar racing games. Shame.

Before you start flicking through your back issues of AMIGA POWER to find out what we thought of the original Top Gear, forget it, there wasn't one. Well, for all we know there might have been one on some other format, but it certainly never came out on the Amiga. Gremlin started using the Top Gear name for console racing games when they found they couldn't use the Lotus licence, so what we've got here is a SNES version of a Lotus-style game converted back to the Amiga.

The Lotus series, you'll recall, started with, er, the prehistoric Lotus 1, hit a high with the graphically lovely, very fast and split-screen two-player-moded Lotus 2 (AP7, 87%) and then went away for almost a year before returning with the 'new and improved' Lotus 3 (AP18, 74%).

Number three may have had a course designer, but it simply didn't have the same 'whoomph' as its predecessor, and it's this lack of 'whoomph' that severely injures Top Gear 2.

EARN
There's not much to say about the principle of the game. You've got a Lotus-meets-Ford Probe kind of car and the idea's to work your way round 64 tracks in 16 countries. There are 20 cars in each race and your position on the starting grid inversely depends on your finishing position of the previous race (so if you won you start at the back and if it you were useless you're near the front). All you have to do to qualify for the next race is to finish in the top ten, although you've got to finish higher to win money and earn points.

The more you win, the more you earn, which means you can splash out on better engines, nitro boosters, tyres and all that happy-Halfords stuff to make your car bigger, better and generally groovier. Eleventh position or below and you're out of the game.

You're given the option of an automatic or manual gearbox, which in my case directly translates to finishing first or finishing last. In Lotus 2 and 3 (yeah, I know I'm ging on about them a lot, but they're actually similar to Top Gear 2) there are two ways you know when to change gear, namely a rev counter that rapidly redlines ("Increases to the maximum speed for that gear" - Ed) and the accompanying unhealthy engine squeal that tells you to change up or blow up. In Top Gear 2 though, the revs are a bit wishy-washy and hang around under the red line for ages and the sound, well read on.

This game's got terrible, terrible sound. I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that most in-game music originates in the hell-spawned mind of Beelzebub himself (with the exception of Dynablaster and The Chaos Engine) but the music in this is extraspecially poor. If I wanted to listen to listless, generic, half-hearted, plinkety-plonkety music, I'd go out and buy a Transvision Vamp CD. (Or play your Philip Glass soundtracks. Again, - Ed).

Thankfully you can turn the music off, only to have it replaced with horrible engine sounds and a piercing tyre squeal on EVERY PIGGING CORNER. Aaargh, another game played in total science.

The races themselves turn out to be all the same, apart from some tracks being longer than others. In the Lotus games, you had races where lorries thundered across crossroads in front of you, or where you could crash through the central reservation and run the risk of ploughing into oncoming traffic, but in this you've got the wide road all to yourself. Yes, just like F1GP, but that's a simulation and not a thrills-and-spills speed racer. So there.

LOGIC
What really hampers Top Gear 2 is the surefire way of finishing in the top three in every single race. Here's how it goes. At the start of every race, regardless of how big your engine is, or how many nitros you use, or what place you start off in, the entire pack will sweep past you and speed off into the distance.

Then, after about thirty seconds, you catch up with the tail-enders and, assuming you don't run into the back of anyone (which drops your speed by about 30mph) you can just overtake everyone and hold tenth position or thereabouts.

Then, on the penultimate lap of the race, just start hitting the nitros to boost your speed and blast you to the front, but don't forget to save one for the very end, as two or three cars usually storm past and you practically on the line, even though they've been trailing you round for most of the race.

It's a simple, winning system (and one that highlights the rubbish opponent drivers - there's no logic as to why the cars overtake you at some stage of the game but you can zoom past them at others, and you rarely have to battle for a position against another car, either blasting past them or getting blasted past. In fact, on one rare occasion where I actually seemed to be going the same speed as another car, I tried to barge it off the road, only to see myself spin out and watch it shrink to a dot in front of me. So if a car barges me off the road, I crash, and if I barge a car off the road, I still crash. Great) which allowed me to get through about half of the game before getting bored and giving up.

Top Gear 2 just doesn't give you the feeling that you're driving a car. You can get round most courses with the throttle permanently open ("The fire button held down all the time" - Ed), the turning circle of your car's wide and ponderous, and when you steer it looks like your car's turning on its centre point rather than the front wheels. All criticisms that can be directed at Lotus 2, true, but that's still more enjoyable than this. It just is. Trust me - I'm a professional.

If I were a cruel and heartless man, I'd give Top Gear 2 a score in the low 40s to convince people not to buy it. But, er, it isn't that bad. It's damned with being average - Lotus 2 beats it on crash-zoom-spill antics, F1GP beats it on realism and handling, and F1 beats everything hands down in terms of excitement and all-round brilliance. Top Gear 2's all right - just don't buy it, okay?