"One of several versions of the Sprint series..and one of the more lacking."

Super Sprint is another odd machine that you won’t find unless you’re not looking for it. I played this machine in a restaurant not too far from my house and that’s the only place that I could find it. Featuring a three player simultaneous feature, steering wheels and a gas pedal, you really can’t expect much from a mid-eighties game and you really won’t find much here to be impressed with. Outside of a difficult computer interface and the ability to play through the game tracks by selection, there is little here to compare it to racing games of today!

The Game Play

The game play is fairly simple, in which you take a small racer and go around one of various laid out tracks, attempting to make laps and finish first to earn plenty of money. The key point of the game is in the two-player department, in which you and a friend as long as computer controlled racers go duke it out to see who made it to the finish line first! Through the races, you have a variety of different obstacles that include oil, which makes your car slip out of control and crash into an exploding wreck against the side of the racetrack.

Even though this may not seem like much when you boil it down, the sheer amount of difficulty and stages that you found later on in the game made it almost an obsession to play. Now, another key point of the game play is that you can go back and upgrade your car with different options that would make it easier to win races with. In the later stages, you’ll need all of the upgrades that you can get, simply because the computer controlled car gets so fast, that you won’t be able to beat it, no matter how hard you try!

Control is done with a steering wheel and a gas pedal. Aside from that, anyone with enough racing knowledge should be able to play through the game and not have too much trouble. What you’ll have trouble with here {and what was corrected in Championship Sprint} is that the tracks are a little tight in some of the corners, with the cars not always having the best handling. You have no choice in what car you get aside from the color, so don’t look for anything special here!

The Visuals

With small cars, and repeating stages, there is actually very little that is wrong with the game, other than there is such a lack of detail and change, that you’ll be rubbing your eye after about an hour of play! I say this simply because the races go on forever, and even though the tracks never change, you’ll only see some subtle differences with the way that the stages are all set up. This only comes with the placement of the hazards, and when you crash, there is nothing that would make you go crazy over the special effect. It’s simply a fire ball that comes to a halt and then you’re placed back on the track to go through the race!

The Audio

Audio wise, the game has no music to listen to through any of the stages! You’ll find that the lack of racing music is something that will make you go mad, because all you have to listen to is the damn engines and the tires squealing on the concrete as you race. With that being said, the sound effects that you do hear are you standard fare of racing effects with the engines racing and the cars exploding when you crash, nothing else. Something that people will find is that it’s hard to race to nothing and the drone of the cars could honestly make some people fall asleep at the wheel!

Why you might not like this game:

Well, for starters, it’s an extremely small visual field with little variety in the tracks. Once you’ve played the available tracks that you can select, there is nothing new or exciting to see or watch when you race again. Add this into the fact that the game has no music to speak of and there really isn’t much on the sound effects track, you’ll find that the game is harder to play simply because of the lack of sound. With that being said, the lack of options that you can literally pump into your racer is useless, because if you crash and burn, it takes forever to get back on the track and in the race!

The Verdict

This is a diversionary title that should only be played if you have nothing else to do. Even for a game that is from the mid-eighties, there are enough problems in the way that it is presented to off-set the fact that you have three players and some pretty long races. If you’re locked in a restaurant with nothing better to do and there is a machine there that says Super Sprint, you could play it for a couple of hours before you start digging your way through the walls to get out. Aside from that, stick with the new wave of racing games and leave this one to collect dust!

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 05/13/02, Updated 05/13/02