Power Drive is a top down view racing game developed in 1994 for the Amiga CD32, Amiga AGA and Sega Mega Drive. A year later, Rage Software released a special version of this game for the Atari Jaguar.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY The main goal on a racing game is to always win, so this is the whole story. Choose your car, race to win! As a sports driver you challenge your skills through a variety of racing to gain the big prize. The races take place on racing tracks laid out on the Arizona Desert, the African plains and the Alps. Controlling your car when drifting is quite hard and depends on the terrain that gives a different driving feel since it's more challenging to drive on snow or mud than on a dry track. There is a limited number of laps but you'll have the opportunity to overtake opponents and ultimately win the race.
GRAPHICS / SOUND The game runs in pseudo-3D environments and its perspective is from above (just like the original Amiga CD32 version). The animation has no slow downs even if the screen is crowded and the visuals on the Jaguar are quite impressive. The engine's sound is greatly sampled and there are some more ambient sounds that accompany you through each race. Comparably, the Atari Jaguar version is slightly better to the Amiga AGA.
Screenshots
Hardware information
Jaguar
CPU: The main processor is called "Jaguar" and it is based on a RISC 3000 MIPS. Co-Processor: MC68000 at 13,3MHz used as a general purpose control processor. MEMORY: 2Mb (64bit bus usinf 4x16bit fast page mode DRAMS GRAPHICS: GPU is called Tom at 26,59MHz, 32bit RISC architecture, 4Kb int. cache. Object Processor: 64bit RISC architecture (could do a variety of graphic architectures). Blitter: 64bit RISC architecture managing high speed logic ops, z-buffering, Gouraud Shading (64bit int.registers). DRAM Controller, 32bit memory management. SOUND: Sound chip is called Jerry. DSP 32bit RISC acrhitecture with 8Kb int.cache. It has CD quality sound while the number of channels used depends on the software. Two DAC (stereo) convert digital data to analog sound signals. Full stereo.
24bit RGB 16,7 million-color palette (16,7M on screen)
Comments
comment on 2010-04-10 00:18:40
Wonderboy
Join Date: 2009-09-12
I played a similar racing called Power Drive on the Amiga 1200. The game was really great. Great graphics and sound! This Jaguar version though looks awesome!