"Watching cars going in opposite circular directions, I almost like this pesky game--maybe it's hypnotizing me."

In Head-On, you are driving a reputed formula 1 racer(maybe it's broken down. It's not too fast) counterclockwise around a track like a square with rounded edges. Each track has five lanes and at any quarter-turn(you start at the bottom) you can move up two lanes towards or away from the center. In each quarter of the lane, there are dots you must pick up--sometimes when the opposing car goes over a quarter-lane, the dots turn big and are worth double. On the first two levels, a car going clockwise will try to crash into you to take one of your four lives and reset all the dots. There are two cars(add one at the top) on level three and three(add a car on the left side) on level five. I was never able to survive level five for too long, so I don't know what horrors level seven has in store. However, at the start of each even level, cars are allowed to switch a lane immediately, instead of after a quarter revolution, making things that much tougher.

Your major advantage over the other cars is that they can only change one lane at each quarter(left or right of center, or above or below it.) There's a certain predestination at times--you'll be trapped with a car coming half-way around, and that's because you didn't plan well enough in advance. There's a basic strategy that's easy enough and will get you most of the way through, but what makes Head-On so difficult is that the opposing car will acquire double speed when you only have a few dots left.

The problem with the difficulty is that there is a lot of lane-shifting you need to do so that you just pass by the other car when you go into your final dot-chomping spree on the first two levels. If not, it simply tears around the bend and nails you, leaving you to start all over again. I find this so enormously discouraging that I often make a very stupid mistake in the aftermath. On the second two levels, you can sucker the cars into becoming one entity according to the computer(and they don't even crash!) but that again requires a lot of lane-shifting. There doesn't seem to be much hope on level five.
For some reason the programmers decided to shift from the usual AZ/arrows to YGJ[space] for the controls to move lanes. Now, YGJ[space] forms a bit of a better diamond, but with AZ and the arrows, you can use one hand for arrows on one turn and the other for arrows on the the next turn.

The computer, somewhat gracefully, allows you two sound options--full and muted. Muted gives a ticking noise when you go over a dot, while full gives engine noises and a scale when you crash(cute explosion, too!) Graphics--well, you look different from your adversaries, and both your cars look like stick figures. Everything's black and white, except the explosion and the dots, which are just a single pixel anyway. It's nice that the top-three score list for the session's on the screen, and I had fun byte-editing the ''game over'' text to a vulgar statement about the player(I vulgarized the graphics and text for the title, too, and I learned something in the process. Hoo-ha.) Overall I suppose the authors didn't try to dazzle you technically.

Once I stayed up past 1 AM trying to get as far as I could. Perhaps going around in circles so much established a pattern for the next few days. My next few days at work weren't quite up to my usual standards, and I found myself moping around faced with daunting tasks like re-reading my favorite Roald Dahl children's books or the laundry or grocery shopping. So I think playing this game really is bad for you. As much as I'd like to give it a low score, though, it is fundamentally sound(the levels get logically tougher) and provokes interesting thought and is a decent change from the general ''perspective'' racing games. However, in practice the positive results of reasoning through this game will frequently be cancelled out by tedium and human error after which you will invariably screw up worse with your next car and be left feeling dumb indeed. Although I've felt dumb before that was at work(where I get paid) or at school(which got me a job.) Even if I were able to track down the programmers I don't think I'd be able to shake them down for much, so I have decided to hold a slight grudge against whomever they are(the program lists only the company name.)

The game can be unpleasantly addictive at the wee hours of the morning, and even though save states and speeding up delay cycles in emulators allow you to go through the levels without continual restarts, this is a tough nut to crack. It's a lot like a jar of spaghetti sauce or two-gallon juice container with a lid you can't twist off--there's a way past the challenge(i.e. some weird kitchen gadget, or for Head-On, giving up because it's obviously less important than eating,) but something drives(that's a pun, son) you to see if you can, and the reward's disappointing. But as for frustration in a simple game, perhaps only that annoying puzzle for the Macintosh where you shifted 15 small squares to form an Apple was worse. Especially since it was random and you couldn't solve it half the time.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 03/16/01, Updated 03/16/01