Zogging Hell!!!

A much maligned part of the Jaguar's early line up Supercross is an arcade scrambler with the player navigating his motorbike round a dirt course in a race against a lot of other motorbikes (unusual that!). People's main issue with Supercross is the frame rate.. or lack of it. Those of us used to 60hz refresh rates will probably find the slow down somewhat painful, though I must admit to not having an issue with it myself. The graphics themselves are a mixture of 2D and 3D with rather bad looking 2D motorbikes imposed over a partially texture mapped 3D track and stadium. The mixture is not a pretty sight for the viewer to behold, with the track and stadium texture mapped but the brown 'dirt' inbetween being a very ugly plain single colour. Playing it of course is slightly different as you don't have time to worry about the graphics that much. Staying on the track is a difficult enough task at first. Stray off the texture mapped track in the slightest and your bike flips over and you invariably end up at the back of the field. Very annoying, but once you get the hang of it not such a big problem. Other riders bump and bash you out the way and there are some nice jumps and leaps to make things more of a spectacle. You can even pull off a couple of tricks while in the air if you feel like showing off. I'm going to stick my neck out here and say that given enough time there is a rather enjoyable racer hidden in this game, even if it does its best to convince you that it is absolutely horrible. Winning the races becomes quite addictive and the learning curve is pretty good, at least on the first couple of difficultly levels. The sound and music are quite good at upping the adrenelin as well, adding nicely to the atmosphere. Seeing this is a first generation Jag game, and quite possibly one of the first 32/64 bit racers with texture mapping ever released, Supercross can perhaps be forgiven for being a bit of an ugly dog, but there is a good game hidden in there... honest!

Zogging Hell Rating: 6/10

Cheats

Crash Replay: Anytime during play, press Pause, then 1-5 to replay the first, second, third, fourth, or fifth crash. After the fifth
crash, 5 becomes the most recent crash, 4 the second most recent, etc...