IndyCar II Review

Indy Car Racing II from-

Reviewed by: Jonathan Wrobel, guest reviewer
Additional layout by: Michael Dixon

Game Information:	Minimum Requirements:
Title: Indy Car II Racing	Processor: PowerPC Mac
Category: Sports/Racing Simulation	Power Mac Native?: YES
Publisher: Sierra;	RAM: 16 MB (8 MB available)
Price (retail): $49.95	Display: 256 colors, 640x480 (14"+) display
Demo available: YES	Copy Protection?: None.
Advisory: Ages: 6+	Other Requirements:15 MB hard disk space, double-speed CD-ROM Drive.

Reviewer recommends:	Reviewed using:
80 MHz 601 PPC Mac	6100/74 PPC
10 MB available RAM	24 MB RAM
14-inch monitor	17-inch AV monitor
Joystick (optional)	Gravis Firebird Joystick

Overview:
Wow! Another racing game brought to the Mac! To my knowledge it comes in the footsteps of Corvette and Al Unser Jr. Arcade Racing. Vette for those who don't remember it, was a corvette simulator based in the streets of San Francisco. Indy Car II is the first complex racing simulator to be brought to the Mac and should thus be heralded as a breakthrough in the Mac market. Unlike Al Unser Jr. Arcade Racing, you don't just drive. No, you are expected to put as much time into "behind the scenes" work as you are the driving. Just like you would if you were an Indy Car driver.

Hardware Demands:
Indy Car II, to my surprise, is for PowerPC Macs only! There is no support of 68k Macs. After looking at the graphics I can see why there is such a huge hardware demand. The graphics used are beautifully drawn textures which remind me of the graphics you would find on a golf game. Imagine this kind of quality but moving around at 200 MPH! You can set the game up to reduce the quality automatically, giving preference to some of the options. The computer will then try and reduce or enhance the quality until 15 fps is achieved, which is fine for normal play. The RAM requirement is a huge disappointment because 8 MB is needed to run the program. Using the built-in speech recognition technology to issue commands to the Mac (a Macintosh version exclusive), it will undoubtedly need even more memory. I did not test this option but there have been no reported problems.
Game Background:
Boldly printed in the Indy Car II manual, Stefan Johansson, an indy car driver exclaims, "It's as close to the real thing as I've ever experienced." How much input he put into the game is unknown and considering it's the first Indy Car sim for the Mac this is not a difficult statement to state. However, one reason why the game is so expensive is because it comes on a hybrid CD-ROM with three versions of the game on it. You are forced to buy a copy of the game for the Mac, Win95 and DOS. Not having a Windows/DOS system I can't comment on how the games compare on the different platforms or whether there is another Indy Car game on the PC to verify this statement. But after seeing a lot of the game I can believe it. The graphics alone are something to gape at!
The Game:
After installing the game I decided to jump straight into the driver's seat. To my horror, in order to get anywhere in the game you will have to pay a visit to the garage. You want a customizable game? This is it! Every possible option that I thought imaginable is made available to you in order to change the setup of the car. Some of these options include tweaking the angle of your front wing, changing tire pressures or even changing the way the gears work. After the initial set up, you can jump into one of the three modes of racing. The first is a test run for you to get used to the handling of your car and the different tracks. The second is just a single race on the chosen track, whilst the third is an actual championship season which pits you against 21 of the top Indy car racers. You have a choice of three different types of engines and suspensions and a choice of two makes of tires. The tracks range from the standard oval shape to the hairpin corners of a street course. Each track holds its own unique environment and track width. The track width can make for big differences when trying to pass a computer-controlled car. The actual cars themselves don't simply crash into you. They have decent artificial intelligence. For instance, they will try and avoid a crash with you if they can, but they are not that quick to respond.
In the championship mode you race on all of the tracks. Your goal is to have the greatest amount of points by end of the season. As far as I could see there was no difficulty setting. If anything I wanted it to be easier! After playing the Al Unser, Jr. Racing game, I was unprepared for what was about to happen. I thought it would be another walk over. Wrong! It was difficult. If you can come in first at the end of the championship, I'll take my hat off to you. In fact, if you do, mail me and tell me how you did it.
I found the straight courses the easiest. The let me kick down the accelerator and gave me a chance to open the engine up. Courses with tight corners were frustrating, due to the fact that you are forced to stay in a low gear.
After playing around in the garage and finding the "improvements" that you have just made are not helping as much as they should, perhaps you need to change the color of your car! Yes, you can change anything and everything in the Paintshop with 150 colors to choose from. Not only can you change five areas of the car, but you can change 10 areas on the racing outfit (clothing) and eight areas on the helmet! Okay, so you can change every possible item, but to my mind this is a bit silly. Changing eight parts on the helmet is not going to improve the game much because you never really see your own helmet. I could complain that they could have put this wasted effort somewhere else, but I would have a hard time selecting an area. Some music would have been nice though.
The Interface:
The interface is thankfully very straightforward. Setting up your keys for the racing is a snap. No sign of an obvious port here. Even though the game was developed and released with the PC versions, there are no signs of the PC heritage. The problem at this point is the manual, which is grouped into two parts: DOS players and Win95/Mac players. While I had no problems with the manual, there were only two screenshots from the Macintosh version of the game. In a 200 page manaul (yes, 200!) only two screenshots is missing the mark. But we Macintosh users are used to it and to be honest, I had no problems in figuring all of the stuff out.
You drive from a cockpit view (you have various external views if desired). The car is controlled by user-defined keys or you can choose to use a joystick. I decided to test my new Firebird joystick from Gravis. I gave up. The stick is not bad, I just found it easier to play this sort of game using the keyboard.
Bug Report:
I did not have any real problems with the game. However, another MGL reviewer had a problem on his 9500/120 with the Paintshop application. He found it extremely unstable when using it. I had no problems within the Paintshop except when booting up the game afterward, in which the Mac crashed. Whether this was from my change in colors is not known. But be aware that I was using System 7.5.1 and the other MGL reviewer was using 7.5.3 on his PCI Mac.

Category	Playability	Interface	Longevity	Stability	Hardware Demands	Value
Score	9	9	8	8	8	9