Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 is a racing game and the second of the Lotus series that shifts focus towards an arcade oriented gameplay. The game was released only for the Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, Acorn Archimedes home computers and the Sega Mega Drive console.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY Lotus 2 is considered a technically impressive game of its genre. As in all Lotus games of the series, Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 is based around the renowned British car manufacturer, Lotus. As an improvement over its predecessor, its single player mode plays in full screen and the opponent cars appear in a variety of colors (the opponent cars of the first game are all white!) Your main goal is to drive your Lotus Elan (or Esprit) like hell and win the race within the time limit. The race tracks vary from highways to gravel roads and your opponents are quite skilled, so driving will become tougher as you proceed. Lotus 2 is an intense game, recommended for all racing fans.
GRAPHICS / SOUND The Amiga version features really smooth and fast animation and the game's backgrounds are nicely detailed with a cool selection of colors (up to 32). The Amiga's sound is great and features impressive car engine, braking and a few more sampled sound effects, but the most impressive part of the game's sound is the intro music, a memorable theme that was among the best Amiga tunes back in the days!
GAMEPLAY SAMPLE VIDEO On our video below you may watch the Atari ST, Amiga OCS and Sega Mega Drive versions of the game.
The Amiga OCS version is at 06:04.
CPU: Motorola MC68000 7.16 MHz MEMORY: 512KB of Chip RAM (OCS chipset - A500), 512 KB of Slow RAM or Trapdoor RAM can be added via the trapdoor expansion, up to 8 MB of Fast RAM or a Hard drive can be added via the side expansion slot. The ECS chipset (A500+) offered 1MB on board to 2MB (extended) of Chip RAM. GRAPHICS: The OCS chipset (Amiga 500) features planar graphics (codename Denise custom chip), with up to 5 bit-planes (4 in hires), allowing 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 color screens, from a 12bit RGB palette of 4096 colors. Resolutions varied from 320x256 (PAL, non-interlaced, up to 4096 colors) to 640x512 (interlace, up to 4 colors). Two special graphics modes where also included: Extra Half Bright with 64 colors and HAM with all 4096 colors on-screen. The ECS chipset models (Amiga 500+) offered same features but also extra high resolution screens up to 1280x512 pixels (4 colors at once). SOUND: (Paula) 4 hardware-mixed channels of 8-bit sound at up to 28 kHz. The hardware channels had independent volumes (65 levels) and sampling rates, and mixed down to two fully left and fully right stereo outputs