Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge is the first game in the Lotus racing games series. It was initially released in 1990 for the Commodore Amiga by Magnetic Field's Shaun Southern and Andrew Morris. The game was later ported to the Atari ST, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum home computers.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY
In Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge you drive a (what else) magnificent Lotus Esprit sports car and race against other Lotus drivers. Each track is lap based and consists of straights, curves and turns of varying degrees as well as hills and hollows that can slow down or speed up the car. Each turn is indicated by a chain of road-side signposts while its difficulty of each turn is reflected by the number of the signposts. Unfortunately, the game window is far too small and takes up just half of the in-game screen! This sometimes may frustrate you since you just can't see the track (especially when ascending)! Nevertheless, Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge was well received by gaming press of the time that praised its quality and 2-players versus mode. All of its versions have been rated around 80-90%. It's also the only title in the series that was released for an 8bit machine as the ones that followed were on 16bit machines only.
GRAPHICS / SOUND The graphics on the Commodore version look a bit "blocky" but they sport several details! Comparably, the overall visuals look better on the CPC (and ZX)! As far as the sound, the game has an almost Amiga-like intro tune, along with some nice engine and braking sound effects (of higher quality than the ZX and CPC counterparts).