Lamborghini American Challenge (aka Crazy Cars 3) is a quite difficult and pretty lengthy racing game with decent visuals and sound, adding also some unique features to the genre. The game was originally released in 1992 for the Commodore Amiga and ported to DOS, Atari ST, Amiga CD32, Game Boy, Amstrad CPC, and Commodore 64. For the video game consoles, it was only ported to SNES in 1994.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY Lamborghini American Challenge is the third game on the Crazy Cars series. It's a classic racer in which the objective is to drive your Lamborghini Diablo and become the undisputed champion in some highly illegal races through mountains, a desert, urban settings and highways of the U.S. Each race is divided into three leagues, each one with increasingly harder opponents. In order to be competitive enough you must regularly upgrade your Diablo (i.e. buy turbo boosts) to keep your car at high performance standards. To participate on a race you need first to bet some money (!). The money left in the pot will be the prize for the 1st place. So win races, gain money, upgrade your Lambo and run like hell!
GRAPHICS / SOUND The in-game and menu screen graphics are pretty good. The Amiga version uses the EHB color mode that gives up to 64 colors on-screen. Comparably, the DOS VGA version has some more colors in the sky background -a smoother color transition. The landscapes are nicely drawn with different palettes featuring daytime and nighttime courses. There are plenty of objects on the sides of the race road, such as trees, rocks and signposts. The animation is smooth enough and makes the action fast and pleasant. The sound on the Amiga version features both intro and main menu music while in-game it includes some cool, sampled sound effects (car engine, spinning etc).
GAMEPLAY SAMPLE VIDEO On our video below you may watch 6 different versions of the game.
The Amiga version is at 10:12.
CPU: Motorola MC68000 7.16 MHz MEMORY: 512KB of Chip RAM (OCS chipset - A500), 512 KB of Slow RAM or Trapdoor RAM can be added via the trapdoor expansion, up to 8 MB of Fast RAM or a Hard drive can be added via the side expansion slot. The ECS chipset (A500+) offered 1MB on board to 2MB (extended) of Chip RAM. GRAPHICS: The OCS chipset (Amiga 500) features planar graphics (codename Denise custom chip), with up to 5 bit-planes (4 in hires), allowing 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 color screens, from a 12bit RGB palette of 4096 colors. Resolutions varied from 320x256 (PAL, non-interlaced, up to 4096 colors) to 640x512 (interlace, up to 4 colors). Two special graphics modes where also included: Extra Half Bright with 64 colors and HAM with all 4096 colors on-screen. The ECS chipset models (Amiga 500+) offered same features but also extra high resolution screens up to 1280x512 pixels (4 colors at once). SOUND: (Paula) 4 hardware-mixed channels of 8-bit sound at up to 28 kHz. The hardware channels had independent volumes (65 levels) and sampling rates, and mixed down to two fully left and fully right stereo outputs