T-Racer

STORY / GAMEPLAY
All you have to do is to get into your spaceship and blast your way through squadrons of aliens. Destroying each and every enemy in your path and collecting bonuses can render your guns stronger, your remaining energy higher and your spaceship stealthy. This can be done by pressing the spacebar or waggle the joystick from left to right to engage the highlighted upgrade depicted as ENERGY, STEALTH or WEAPON at the bottom of the play field. Note that stealth and weapon upgrades are time limited. The game has 6 levels, each one divided into two sun sectors. At the end of each sector, you are called to confront a big boss (an armed to teeth mothership), each with its own strengths and weaknesses. It is easily noticed that the gameplay and story line are almost identical to the fantastic Project X. Between sectors there are some bonus stages in which you gravitate towards gaps in the walls that alternate movement from top to bottom and left to right. Strangely enough, this particular gameplay area is presented in a...Sega Game Gear frame(!) The longer you survive in these stages the bigger the bonuses carried through into the next level. Much like Project X, the difficulty level is set rather high so no matter how powerful your ship gets, it always remains under-powered and when you lose a life your firing power gets weaker, making the whole experience as hard as hell! The main significant difference on this one is that this time you have an energy bar so you'll last a bit longer compared to Project X that's one-shot-dead!

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The game's visuals are superb, with multi-layered parallax scrolling, up to 137 colors on-screen (with Copper effects) and dozens of fast and greatly animated sprites. The scrolling is extremely smooth as well. In contrast to Project X (which has up to 64 colors on-screen) there are no pre-rendered sprites. As for the game's sound, T-Racer is a combination of high quality sampled sound effects and a robot voice that warns you of your status. The absence of music during gameplay is on the negative side of this title but the quality of its sound effects makes it a particularly appealing game.