PC Engine
Taito 1990
Ah Chase HQ: an intoxicating slammer of Outrun speed married to a Glenn A. Larson-style car chase. You are a couple of badass, rule bending, 80s cops called Tony Gibson and Raymond Broady, card-carrying members of the Care Bear Club, oh and also the Chase Special Investigation Department. They drive a high powered Porsche 928, chasin’ and shuttin’ down bad guys in high speed pursuits.
It was a massive favourite of mine in the arcades back in the 90s, I spent a fortune on it. A game that big and loud was always going to be a challenge to blend down to a home machine pulp and unsurprisingly it had mixed results. The Amstrad conversion is astounding and the Spectrum version is nothing short of a miracle of optimizing. Every aspect of the game is there: it’s more tightly packed than Sophie Howard’s swimsuit.
Make the switch to the beige machines and it all starts to go terribly, terribly wrong. The Amiga version could sort of, maybe, be picked out of a line-up whilst squinting, but it drives like a tortoise with a grand piano on its back, walking through custard. And the C64 has a face not even its mother could love: blocky, ugly and sluggish.
So we come to the PC Engine version, doesn’t it look great from the screen shot? It is pure racing glamour.
Alas that is where the feel good mood dissolves, as when it moves, it falls over. Your car, an example of precision German automotive engineering, skids and flops around like an old 70s Cadillac on its last legs driving on an ice skating rink.
As a consequence, you will crash on all corners and thump into every single car. I have no idea why but all of the other road users seem to have got up that morning and decided to get in your way deliberately. Due to shocking collision detection and despite the road clearly being a three-lane highway, it just never seems wide enough. You crash into absolutely everything despite being comfortably in your own, empty lane. Forget ramming the criminal's car, it'll take you several continues to even catch sight of the bugger.
I had high hopes for this one, as NEC’s pocket rocket certainly has the potential to do this justice, but it failed. If a Spectrum with its steam-powered architecture can pull it off with such class then this has no excuse. It is simply a very poor, disappointing conversion.
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