Enter Gremlin Interactive, who is promising to break the speed barrier with over 50 frames per second, with its futuristic racer -- Motorhead.
Created by Scandinavia's largest game developer, Digital Illusions, Motorhead's 3D engine will grab you by the gear stick. The 3D engine is capable of hurling out 600,000-plus textured polygons per second. Even the cars and tracks are each drawn with 300 and 15 000-17 000 polygons respectively.
Sleek graphical touches such as, fogging, tire smoke, sun glare, dust and lighting effects are also par for the course, and not at the expensive of frame rate, as I found while playing a recent beta. Even the software version is surprisingly picturesque -- without a 3D card, the game still whizzes by faster than Ben Johnson on speed. Of course a 3D accelerator such as the 3Dfx or PowerVR really sets things on fire.
Thankfully the gameplay also seems to be on the right track. Don't expect fixed paths or static patterns in Motorhead; there aren't any. As the race takes place in real time, the effects of other cars crashing into cones or other objects will affect you accordingly. Power-sliding and/or nudging other opponents (preferably human!) into walls or off the track allows a gamer's more devious and dark side to play a part. Sparks fly when grazing walls and skid marks remain on the road after high-speed power-slides. Incidentally, the crashes and jumps are as tasty as anyone else's.
The finished article will provide a three division racing league with six tracks. The better you do the more cares become available; there are nine in total. Another method of play will be 'Time Attack' where you try and set your best time without any CPU opponents and saving the best times on to your hard drive. You will then be able to follow this up by racing with in a ghost mode. Multiplayer will also be catered for up to eight players across a LAN or the Internet.
Motorhead is being developed by Digital Illusions and will be published by Gremlin Interactive and should be available in April, 1998. It will support 3Dfx, PowerVR, Direct3D, Steering Wheels, and eight player multi-player games over a LAN or Internet.
And no, this game doesn't have anything to do with the heavy metal rock band Motorhead.
