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Ray Broady and Tony Gibson are law enforcement officers working at Chase HQ in New York. Their work is to roam the freeways in search for hardened criminals on the loose. Driving a powerful Porsche 928 and with the assistance of the always helpful Nancy the hunt is on. As soon as Nancy gives you the name of the criminal on the run, and the car he’s driving you put the pedal to the metal to go in hot pursuit. “Let’s go Mr. Driver!”.
First thing to do is to catch up with the escaping villain within a certain time limit. Driving like a madman you have to evade all traffic and take the right turns at junctions or else you loose valuable time. Luckily there are three nitro-boosts at your disposal, which temporarily give you some extra speed. When the criminal’s car is in sight the clock resets and it is time to apprehend the guy. In Chase HQ this must be done in a rather unorthodox way. You’ll have to turn the criminal’s car into a peace of junk by ramming it repeatedly with you trusty 928. This is pain to the eyes for a Porsche-fan! A damage indicator will let you know how much more destruction is needed before the thug will surrender. “You have the right to remain silent!”.
You’ll have to catch five criminals this way to complete the game, while each succeeding level will get harder. Chase HQ is a conversion of the hugely popular coin-up. When Ocean got the rights, the expectations were very high; could Ocean transfer the outstanding arcade game to the home computer in a good way? Just before I wrote this review I played both the Amiga-version of Chase HQ (of course) and the coin-up, to be able to make a good comparison.
The Amiga-version
After sliding the Chase HQ disk into your trusty Amiga you’ll first be treated with a rather nice title screen and music. The music throughout the game is very decent and it is pretty true to the music of the coin-up. When you start the game the communication interface will appear and Nancy starts to inform you about the soon to be arrested villain and the vehicle he’s driving. “This is Nancy at Chase HQ. We’ve got an emergency here!”.
Then it’s time to burn some rubber! When your Porsche is in view you hit the gas causing the car to produce a lot of smoke but it doesn’t seem to pick up much speed. You don’t give up easily and you keep accelerating… you switch gears, from low to high, and keep accelerating… but you don’t appear to reach very high speeds. A glance at your speedometer tells you differently, because you are doing a whopping 300 km/h! This is one of the big disappointments of this conversion. There is hardly a sense of speed! Doing 300 km/h seems like you’re doing 80 km/h! Regardless, you keep on driving. The first corner appears so you turn in. Your tires start to produce severe sounds and your car doesn’t seem to want to steer. You slide to the side and before you know it you hit a lamppost.
This is another disappointment of the conversion. Even at relatively low speeds in bends, which are almost straight, your cars seems to have a magnetic attraction to roadsides. Also on straights your car steers very sluggish, so evading other traffic isn’t always easy. ‘Hey Ocean, this is supposed to be a supercar!’. This lack of controllability is very frustrating, especially in the latter levels. Then, the roads twist and turn much more and you’ll have a lot of trouble even trying to keep up with the bad guy, who seems to own a car with proper steering. While the all-important seconds pass by, your blood pressure starts to rise out of pure anger and frustration.
The last disappointment is the in-game graphics. Your car-sprite is a little different from the coin-up version, but it’s okay. The other cars on the road, the “traffic” so to speak, are terrible, just like the objects beside the road and the backdrops. Especially graphics near the horizon seem to get very blocky and vague. It looks as if Ocean took 5 minutes to draw them. The amount of objects beside the road is very minimal and the level of detail is very low to say the least. The helicopter, which flies above you in the coin-up in some levels, is left out in the conversion.
Amiga-version vs. Coin-up
So, the Amiga-version of Chase HQ isn’t very good, looking at it as a racing game. But how does it compare to the coin-up? Graphically the coin-up is much better with much more objects and more details, giving you the impression you are really driving through different landscapes. Sonically, it’s also more impressive with a lot more speech thrown at you. But these things can be expected from the coin-up version compared to the Amiga one and this isn’t that worrying as long as the gameplay is okay. And that is what the coin-up does have compared to the Amiga Chase HQ, and in great quantities at that! While playing, you really have a sense of great speed and the car reacts perfectly to your steering. You can play with the car, so to speak, and that’s the most important feature of a racing game!
Concluding one can say that Ocean have tried to copy the coin-up to the Amiga and failed to do it properly. Although the sound is rather good with the recognisable tunes and speech, the graphics are rather disappointing. But the most important thing of ANY game is the playability, and this is so miserable in the Amiga-version of Chase HQ, it can lead to frustration, anger and violent reactions, which can ultimately cause serious health problems. As a racing game this is bad and as a coin-up conversion this is very disappointing!
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The graphics in Chase HQ seem to mimic the coin-up graphics, but in a bad way. Although pretty colourful, there’s a complete lack in detail and variation throughout the game. The lack of objects makes the landscape look very empty and dull. Especially compared to the coin-up graphics. Also, the New Yorkers seems to be interested in only three types of cars, which makes the traffic very monotonous.
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The music in the game is okay and it is pretty true to the coin-up. Also the sound FX are good with some nice speech from the original arcade thrown in.
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The Amiga version of Chase HQ fails in the playability-department big time! There is no sense of speed making you ask yourself whether the speedometer of your Porsche is broken. Controlling your supercar is terrible. With the steering of a lorry you have to hit the brakes in the widest bends to keep your tires on the road.
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| While the coin-up was very good and enjoyable back in the late eighties, the Amiga-conversion destroyed every bit of enjoyment and fun due to the atrocious gameplay. Ocean struck gold when acquiring the licence and they wasted a huge opportunity to make a monster hit on the Amiga! |
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Get Amiga Forever with pre-installed Workbench, games, applications, and much more.
It also contains the original Amiga ROM-files, 100% legally!
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