Jaguar XJ220 review
May 6, 2009It’s been a long time since my last post (real life gets in the way once more!) and there have been a couple of developments on the ST gaming scene while I’ve been away – more on those later. Meanwhile, lets have a closer look at Oberje’s release of his Jaguar XJ220 conversion. If you’ve read my previous post you’ll know that an ST version of the classic Amiga racer was planned but canned before it saw the light of day (for more details see the Guardians of the PaST entry). With a gentle prod from the Guardians, Oberje compiled the playable code he had and made it available for us to enjoy.
Though not quite complete enough to get the full review treatment, I have got a gameplay vid and some screenshots to show you.
The game pootles along at a fair whack, trackside objects shoot past giving a good impression of speed. Everything is well drawn and scales nicely into the distance. Their are different terrains and the fog effect found in some races is interesting: using dither effects to give the impression of cars emerging from the gloom. It is hard to follow the track at times; the road disappears just a few feet in front of your car (this may be a quirk of emulation – I’m using Steem and have yet to try it on real hardware).
Something that I’m sure would have been tweaked before release: the cars handling is sluggish, not due to any joystick lag, but when steering left and right, your XJ220 takes an age to get from one side of the track to the other. This makes overtaking more fiddly than it aught to be and sometimes it can feel like the game is steering around the corners for you. The lack of sound is a shame, as the Amiga version featured some great tunes and it would have a been a treat to hear some conversions.
Oberje has done a cracking job so far in bringing this to the ST, and it is easy to imagine this being a cracking little racer if Oberje was allowed to finish it.
Gameplay video – nb: the music was added afterwards by me!
Further reading
- Guardians of the PaST entry
- D-Bug page – D-Bug have patched it to be Hard Disk installable! See the news item for 19/03/09
- Amiga Action review – Jaguar XJ220 scored a whopping 98% in June 1992
The Joy Of Sticks 
Looks nice and importantly, well, you’re back dear Stickhead! Lovely.
Yes, nice to have you back!
Cool review, the game does look a bit crappy though 😉
Thanks for the review. The game looks OK (probably still not as good as Lotus II or Vroom) and is certainly better than anything the ST has had released in the last few years.