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Fuel is unplayable on my home machine, due to scenery pop-up so bad that the ground beneath my car doesn’t appear unless I stop and look directly at it for 15 seconds. The only natural response to this was to start playing Lotus III: The Ultimate Challenge.
Lotus 3 was released in 1992 and developed by Magnetic Fields. They had probably my favourite logo of any Amiga-era developer. It sounds so epic, and seemed so grown up to my childbrain.
Returning to Lotus 3 prompted three weekends spent playing Amiga games, including Lotus 2, Overdrive, Ruff ‘n’ Tumble, The Chaos Engine, The Settlers, Walker, Prince of Persia and Flashback. Observations so far: Superfrog is as shit as I remember, and Lotus 3 is even more awesome.
Playing it now, I’m realising that I never really made it beyond stage 3, even on the easiest difficulty settings. I think there are a whole bunch of games from my childhood that I absolutely love, but that I never got further than the first twenty minutes. I sucked, but didn’t care. I had no competitive drive in most games; no idea that there was an end to be reached, and very little sense of my own failure.
It’s also only now that I realise that the race tracks are randomised. The string of letters displayed on the screen before each level, which I always mistook for some far-off Scandanavian location, were actually a code representing the track. Lotus 3 comes with a track editor called RECS, the Racing Environment Construction Set. You don’t place specific pieces of road, but instead play with percentages: 60% corners, 15% obstacles, this weather, and so on.
Create your track and you get an XX-letter string with a two-digit number, which you can then enter at any point to return to your created track. It’s pretty powerful.
The result is that you’re never able to learn the tracks. Fail, and the next time you play it’ll be different. While in something like Spelunky, randomly generated levels stops the repetition becoming boring, racing games normally thrive on that repetition. It’s how you improve: learning the corners, perfecting your time. So Lotus 3 isn’t about cornering.
This is made even more obvious when you consider that the game does most of the cornering for you. Even on the hardest difficulty, the car still automatically moves most of the way around each bend. You’ll go off the edge slightly and slow down if you do nothing at all, but it still shifts the challenge to other areas.
The challenge – the ultimate challenge, I guess – instead lies in overtaking. I can’t be sure, but I think the other cars in the road deliberately move in front of you to block your path.
It lies in managing your fuel load. Longer races mean having to stop off at designated areas to re-fuel, something which the computer drivers don’t have to do.
It lies in dodging obstacles. In the woodland areas, these are puddles and fallen logs. In the desert areas, it’s sand dunes. In windy areas, you’re fighting against a gust pushing you off the track (visually indicated by rolling tumbleweeds – who needs Fuel for weather effects?). And, in the futuristic sci-fi races – yes – you’re at the whim of timed laser shields that flash across the track.
Removing the focus on cornering is maybe a consequence of the limited technology of the time. Racing games from the era – those with Lotus 3’s perspective, at least – normally had your car sitting stationary while the track moved around you. That changes the feel of taking a corner. There’s certainly no sense of the backend of the car swinging around, or powersliding into bends. There are no physics, there couldn’t have been. So Lotus 3 facilitates fun in other parts of its racing simulation.
This is helped by the fantastic music. Before each race, you’re presented with your car radio, through which you select what music you want to drive to. This had such an enormous effect on me as a kid. This car I’m driving, it has a car radio, like a real car. The music? I chose it. The soundtrack is what I’ve remembered most about the game for the last 15 years, particularly the title track. It’s had me dancing in my kitchen for weeks now, and listening to it via YouTube videos at work.
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