By:
UbiSoft

Out:
NOW

The racing game genre and all its spin offs- planes, trains and automobiles; all creatures great and small- we've raced them all. Still, for some odd reason, developers usually haven't fancied reproducing the same formula, deviated only by sticking a two wheeled contraption between their legs, thus leaving the PC bike genre somewhat lackluster. In contrast to leather and Motorbikes going hand in hand, PC's and Motor Bike racing games (Moto Racer and Motocross Madness apart) haven't. But S&M lovers, don't pack away your leather gear just yet, because in Redline Racer, developers Criterion Studios looks to have given the genre a much-needed fuel injection.

In today's world of 3D nirvana- the all-important questions asked of Redline Racer's 3D engine are firmly given the Sharky Extreme spicy, tasty and spanky seal of approval. Criterion's 'in-house' DIVE engine was also used for Sub Culture (their sub-aquatic Elite style game) and took some five years of R&D to develop. Although the games has been out for some time in the UK now and only recently been released in the US I was still impressed by the 3D engine. Actually, so was Intel. Redline Racer was originally used by Intel to promote their Pentium II and AGP technology. And it's easy to see why. With a Pentium II meshed with an AGP 3D card, over 12megs of textures can be stored, although the game will automatically scale the texture detail dependant upon a particular machine's configuration. For those that need their polygon counts just as much as cops need their jelly donuts- count some of following. How would 3000 polygons per bike and rider grab you? Pretty good. Or what about 12 000 polygons per frame at 640x480 in 16bit color? Not amazing in this day and age but still pretty tasty. It clearly grabbed Intel by the unmentionables because wherever you see an Intel 740 (and at the last count there were some 70 different manufacturers of the board!); you'll most likely see Redline Racer being tooled to promote it.