Porsche comes to shove
Need for Speed: Porsche 2000
Sony PlayStation £29.99 Electronic Arts ****
Let the wind ruffle your hair in more than 70 (74) different models of Porsche! Take a thrill-packed ride through more than 50 (52) years of motoring history! Race friends or computer opponents on more than one (three) racetracks!
All the exclamation marks in the world can't disguise the fact that Porsche 2000 is, at heart, just another driving game. But at least this one does exactly what it says on the tin.
Apart from a few invisible walls, the graphics are about as good as you'd expect for the PlayStation. The performances of the models, from the 356 No 1 to the 996 Turbo, vary noticeably (although not too noticeably, obviously: EA would never dare suggest that any Porsche ever handled less than brilliantly).
And if the number of tracks is less than impressive, the number of things you can do on them boggles the mind.
Test-drive your Porsche, race your Porsche, repair, repaint or customise your Porsche, take your Porsche out for a Sunday afternoon pootle.
You'll probably even spend a disproportionate amount of time watching your Porsche spin round in a vacuum on the "select car" screen. But the thing that's thrumming under Porsche 2000's bonnet is its Evolution mode, a sort of 50-year tournament in which progress through races is ingeniously married up with a trawl through the German manufacturer's back catalogue.
As PlayStation drivers go, then, this is the, er, Porsche of them. But if you want a blonde with shades to caress your knee while you drive, you'll have to fork out an extra £39,965 for a real one. (AB)
Little things please Little minds
Stuart Little: Big City Adventures
Windows 95/98 £19.99 Hasbro Interactive ***
If you liked the film, you will like the game. It has much the same look, albeit with simplified graphics, the same voices, and the five mini-games are based on scenes from the film.
Playing Stuart Little, a white mouse with humanoid tendencies, you can steer a yacht across a pond, drive a little red sportster, and play miniature golf.
Of course, if you liked the film then you are probably aged between four and 10, and the game is pitched at the middle of that market. It is probably too hard for four year olds and far too trivial for anyone in their teens, but six-to-eights should find it a tough but achievable challenge.
Switching a train around some complicated tracks, picking up flags on the way, will make even older players think hard. Indeed, this is the one mini-game that might be considered to have some educational value.
The program does offer lots of verbal encouragement, and while there's no multi-user play, high-score tables encourage competition.
I'm doubtful about the game's longevity. Children love repetition but it could have offered a lot more variety. Given the work that has gone into the graphics and sound, it should have been easy to add more tracks and more scenarios. As it is, the program's quality is savagely undercut by the lack of quantity.
Still, it could have been a lot worse, as the Stuart Little websites www.stuartlittle.com and www.stuartlittlemovie.co.uk show only too well. (JS)
Die Hard hardly comes alive
Die Hard Trilogy 2: Viva Las Vegas
PC CD Rom £29.99 Fox Interactive *
Some people see laziness as a virtue. After all, isn't the world better off with remote controls and delivered pizzas? The developers of Die Hard Trilogy 2 obviously think so, as this is the laziest console-to-PC conversion since the last Final Fantasy game.
Things go wrong from the start. There is no install option - that's right, it all runs off the CD, a bit like the PlayStation. Then the game itself allows you to save your progress only at the end of a level, a feature commonly found in, you've guessed it, console games.
Not that you'll be playing long enough to care, as the three mini-games that make up Die Hard Trilogy 2 would fail to impress even the biggest Bruce Willis aficionado.
First up is the laughable third-person section that sees you shooting wildly at rioting jail inmates while the camera sways drunkenly behind you. The game's console roots are more than evident, with horrendously low-res models and a constant fog that restricts vision to a few feet ahead.
Fog is used by necessity in many console games, which can't cope with extended draw-distances, but in a PC game - and one that requires a 3D-accelerator card to run at that - it is unforgivable.
This pea-souper reappears in the vehicle section, although since this level involves driving a car that handles like a dustcart around a cardboard looking city, you'll probably be too bored to notice.
And, by the time you comprehend that the best part of the game is a Time Crisis-style shooting section complete with sluggish mouse aiming, you'll have thrown the CD out of the window.
Shocking. (GH)
