Nigel Mansell's World Championship is a formula-1 racing game, named after the famous world's Formula 1 champion. This game combines speed and detail and was released for the Commodore Amiga OCS & AGA, Atari ST & STE, DOS, Amstrad CPC, Nintendo NES / SNES and Sega Mega Drive / Genesis.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY
World championship is about to start and you have to race through 16 race tracks. Each track is unique and every race includes a variety of conditions like dry weather, rain, heavy rain! Prior to a race, you may view a few details (such as the length of the race, the map to watch particular hard curves and more). Now, depending on the information gleaned from briefing, you have the option to modify your car. You can change the aero-foils to improve traction, choose gear ratio to determine acceleration and top speeds or swap tires to fit on the weather you're about to race! There is also the option to run a warm up lap or a time lap that will determine your grid position. During the race you will face professional drivers, specialists in overtaking you fast. During the race you can pit stop to replace your worn set of tires (i.e. change hard tires when the weather changes dramatically into heavy rain). The racing area is quite narrow though, making it difficult to overtake the opponents. Despite the impressive and smooth presentation of this game, the race tracks are both unrealistic and unconvincing, especially when compared to MIcroprose's Formula One GP. But that's OK, since Nigel Mansell's World Championship is not intended to be a simulator rather than an arcade formula racer. The game is great for arcade racing fans, rather than sim fanatics!
GRAPHICS / SOUND
The game on the Atari ST has good looking visuals with many details and nicely drawn cars and well presented weather effects (light rain, heavy rain) but with only up to 24 colors on-screen! Unfortunately this racing game has some frame-rate problems. As for its sound the main menu tunes are good but while the in-game sound effects (especially the engine) are quite annoying after a while.
GAMEPLAY VIDEO
On our video below you may watch the Atari ST, Amiga OCS / ECS, Amiga AGA, MS DOS, Sega Mega Drive and Nintendo SNES versions of the game.
CPU: Motorola 68000 16/32bit at 8mhz. 16 bit data bus/32 bit internal/24-bit address bus. MEMORY: RAM 512KB (1MB for the 1040ST models) / ROM 192KB GRAPHICS: Digital-to-Analog Converter of 3-bits, eight levels per RGB channel, featuring a 9-bit RGB palette (512 colors), 320x200 (16 color), 640x200 (4 color), 640x400 (monochrome). With special programming techniques could display 512 colors on screen in static images. SOUND: Yamaha YM2149F PSG "Programmable Sound Generator" chip provided 3-voice sound synthesis, plus 1-voice white noise mono PSG. It also has two MIDI ports, and support mixed YM2149 sfx and MIDI music in gaming (there are several games supported this).