Chase H.Q.

STORY / GAMEPLAY
Chase H.Q. is a car racing / shooter game but not as the most of racing games we already know. In this game, you control a police vehicle, patrolling the highways until you spot, chase and ram criminal cars, until they finally submit! You have a fast, black Porsche 928S at your disposal and drive through various urban and rural roads, attempting to catch up with a specific car (as per the orders given via 'Nancy', the operative girl back at your HQ). The status panel at the top of the screen indicates the score, the time left, the car's speed (the faster the better) and the distance you need to cover until you find the villain you're chasing. Once the main criminal's car comes on sight, your sirens begin to wail and you have sixty seconds to smash the car into submission, making its driver to pull over and arrest the guy. The criminal's car is constantly moving away from you, so if you repeatedly crash your 928S or drive too slow, the criminal will ultimately escape. During the game, at some points the road splits so you must choose the correct path, otherwise it will take you longer to catch the criminal. In general, Chase H.Q. is a really unique game that looks and plays differently from all the early, car-based video games.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The Amstrad CPC conversion is a direct port from the ZX Spectrum and offers very nice and (way more) colorful graphics. The cars and the surroundings (that vary on each level) are quite impressive, with vivid colors and nicely drawn details like trees, highway lights, traffic signposts and more. The CPC screen scrolling is cool and is awkwardly smoother compared to the C64 version(!) Overall, the CPC version looks better to the other two 8bit counterparts (C64 and ZX) in terms of details, screen scrolling and colors. The game offers an equally good sound, with nice car engine effects and sirens, as well as car crash effects. On the 128k version there is a nice sampled speech at the beginning saying "Hold on man!". Unfortunately there is no music during gameplay (found only on the C64 conversion) but the main menu tune resembles well the original.