Championship Sprint

Copyright : Electric Dreams | Reviewed by : Malc Jennings

Championship Sprint was a huge arcade success when it was launched by Atari games and people (at least those I knew) couldn?t wait for the home computer conversion of the game. The game itself is basically a top-down racer in which you go head to head against 3 computer controlled cars or a second human player around some very tough courses, can you handle it?

Graphics

Championship Sprint certainly looks the part on the Amstrad CPC with pretty much all of the arcade race tracks ported across without any problems what so ever. Because the game is a top-down perspective racer there are very few faults that can be found in the graphical side of the game, it certainly isn?t as pleasing on the eyes as Off Road Challenge but then again neither was the arcade unit. The playing area remains nice and large and hasn?t been resized too much to fit the CPC screen, all in all the game looks very good on our beloved home computer and there are little faults that can be made about it.

Having said that there are times when your car can get stuck in the edges of the race track and by the time you get out again to race the rest of the course you have been overtaken 3 or 4 times by the computer, a major annoyance at times.

Sound

Sound is almost dead on arrival, we have no introduction music at the start of the game and no music in the game itself. In-game sounds are limited to the sound of your own car engine (which is fairly basic by any standard) and the occasioanal but poor bang sound when you hit the edge of the race track or another car, we should be thankful that Atari even gave us these sounds realy but with this giant being bigger than some other names we should also expect slightly more.

Gameplay

Now here is the problem for Championship Sprint, the game is very difficult to control with either the joystick or the keyboard and can be extremely annoying at times. We had to reboot the emulator and a real life CPC several times to test this theory and it comes down to poor programming, you often get stuck in the edges of the race track and the control system is well and truly awful.

The only thing that kind of saves this game from being a total waste of money is the additional feature of being able to build your own race course and then drive around it in the game itself when finished, this was fairly unique back in the day and would certainly have boosted interest in those just browsing and reading the back of the box.

It has to be said, Championship Sprint is one of the worst top-down arcade conversions we have seen so far on the CPC and should therefore be avoided.