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Porsche, the legendary car brand from Stuttgart, has produced cars for over fifty years now. Their first car was the 356, which saw the light on June 8th of the year 1948. From then on Porsche made cars the average person could only dream about. Porsche doesn’t make cars just for the road; they also participate in racing with their super cars. Uncountable victories in all kinds of classes make Porsche one of the most successful racing brands around!
If you are one of those people who dreams of owning a Porsche, or let alone race with one, stop dreaming, because here is Turbo Cup! Now you have the chance to put on your helmet and race a real 944 Turbo against other fierce drivers on several tracks! The company who made the game is Loriciel and with such games as Panza Kick Boxing, Sherman M4 and Jim Power under their belt, one can have at least a certain amount of anticipation when booting Turbo Cup. Add to that a personal approval of the famous 944 Turbo driver René Metge (who’s that?!) and you can expect a winner! Let’s try the game and see for ourselves!
After a title-screen showing you the man himself, René Metge, accompanied by a rather mediocre tune, you are confronted with an option-screen. If you expect a lot of options, you will be disappointed, because Turbo Cup has none; besides letting you choose one of four tracks to race on, namely: Magny-Cours, Dijon-Prenois, Nogaro and Paul Ricard.
After selecting a track you will immediately be put in your 944 to set a laptime, which will determine your starting position in the race. When you finished your lap, you won’t be informed about your results, because that would be a waste of time. Turbo Cup is a racing game; so racing is what you will do! Just when you’ve crossed the finish line in your timed lap, you won’t be given any time to catch your breath, or to reflect on your qualifying lap, you will immediately find yourself on the starting grid and when the lights are green it’s: “go go go!!!” The race consists of 2 laps, which isn’t indicated anywhere on the screen. You’ll find that out when you cross the finish line the second time when your car stops with a lot of smoke. After the race you can have a quick (and when I mean quick, I mean QUICK!) glance at the race-results after which you’ll promptly be redirected to the initial option-screen where you can choose another (or the same) track to go through the whole experience once more. There is no championship-option or anything else for that matter; just single races on the given four tracks.
As you have understood from these words, Turbo Cup is a rather empty and absurdly simple game, with hardly anything in it. But is it good nonetheless?
The first time you’re confronted with the racing part of the game, you’ll notice the viewing-position of your vehicle is a bit different. We as gamers are used to seeing our "engine on wheels" from behind or above in the arcade-racers, which we play. Turbo Cup uses a position more or less between the two, although more from behind then above. Graphically this game isn’t something to anxiously write the family about. The main car is rather okay and it’s pretty nicely animated. The tracks however are very boring, to say the least and the objects beside the tracks look like they've been drawn a few minutes before the game got released. This probably benefits the speed of the game, which is pretty fast, although a bit shocky, but it makes the game rather dull. A big graphical glitch is the road, which immediately stops at the bottom of the screen. This looks very sloppy as you can see from the screenshots!
Soundwise Turbo Cup is very limited, and what's there is not good. Your engine is a monotonous hum and apart from that there’s also a sound of squeaking tires when you make a 360-spin… that’s it.
And how about the gameplay? Apart from the lack of depth in this racing game, the driving-bit is pretty annoying. As I said before, the game plays rather quick, but turning into a corner that can hardly be called a corner will cause your car to spin without warning on many occasions. Just when you have gained a few positions, you’ll fall back because of this… making you grind your teeth in frustration. Apart from that the computer drivers don't seem to use their mirrors and if they do, they are rather homicidal. Without any reason, they swerve from left to right, revealing a considerable liquor abuse among the drivers in this Turbo Cup. And when you finished your second lap of the race, you’ll be glad it’s all over and you probably won’t bother to have another go.
Turbo Cup is a very bleak arcade-racer, which is badly executed, and with only four tracks, this is a game with close to nothing in it. Even the autograph of René Metge can't change much about that!
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Although the main car sprite could be worse the tracks are very simple and contain hardly any details. The race-indicators are useless and lack a lap-indicator or a track-map. The speed of the game is okay, although a bit shocky.
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The music at the title-screen isn't special and the in-game sounds are simple and very limited.
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The minimal number of tracks to race on, the lack in race-modes (only single races!), the at times uncontrollable car you drive and the strange and unpredictable driving-behaviour of your computer-rivals, make this game a frustrating and unsatisfactory peace of software.
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| As a big Porsche-fan, I'm reluctant to say that Turbo Cup is a very dire game! The reason of its birth is beyond me to be honest. This game is badly executed and it hardly contains any depth. Only interesting for sadomasochists maybe, otherwise, play Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge instead. |
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