As you may have got from previous entries, I’m really interested in locations in games and the sense of place that they can give. In particular, when it came to OutRun I focused on its ambiguous location. OutRun and its successors in checkpoint driving games are an interesting case, because they have little chance for exploration (the odd branching path aside) but are an excellent vehicle for moving you through a place very fast. They can instead offer a journey. And alongside and tangled together with its sense of style, it was the journey in OutRun that stood out, the feeling of freedom as the different locations whizzed past. The checkpoints you had to reach were there to make a game of it, but they were a lesser concern.
Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 is another checkpoint driving game with a red sports car, but it has far less of a sense of travelling through real places than OutRun. The context that makes easy sense of this is that it’s the sequel to Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge, a circuit-based racing game smarter than an advertising vehicle for a sports car maker had any right to be, which largely got its story-making buzz from its competitive racing. (The ‘Esprit’ disappeared from the name for the sequel as Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 includes another model; the next sequel would shorten things further to Lotus 3, not to be confused with the significantly less thrilling Lotus 1-2-3)
So, it doesn’t have the same sense of place. It doesn’t have any grand conceptual gimmick like Chase HQ either. What does Lotus 2 bring instead? Well, the fact that it’s purpose-built for the Amiga, rather than an imperfect arcade conversion, helps it to look and sound amazing by comparison, with a properly sized car and road, varied environments, and a smooth sense of speed. Its racing is precision-tuned as well, hitting the sweet spot that doesn’t fall into either being too exactly or being able to rush through everything without ever slowing down. Each of its corners takes some consideration, but it’s not hard to get a good flow going. It runs just about as nicely in split-screen two player, too, which is how I mostly remember playing it.
All of that is important, but less so than the other way Lotus 2 stands out, which is that while it doesn’t have one grand gimmick, it has a whole load of perfectly paced small ones instead. Rather than the featureless roads or haphazard and disjointed challenges of others, it’s structured more like a post-Super Mario Bros. 3 platformer, with a constant stream of new ideas to adjust to.
Each stage has an over-arching theme to give it its own identity – forest, night, motorway, fog, snow – and sets up a baseline challenge. You get a mass start of other cars so it feels like you are in some kind of competition, the road sweeps from side to side, and you get a feel for the stage. Then every time you meet a checkpoint, a new challenge is layered in. The forest gains up and down hill sections, streams of water to jump over, and then groups of rocks on the road. The motorway goes from merely having oncoming cars on the other lane to having lorries cutting across the road to dodge. There’s barely a moment that isn’t throwing something new and fun in, and there are hundreds of little stories about minor happenings that it lends itself to as a result.
Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 never gets away from its artificiality, but it doesn’t even try to. Instead, it’s a reminder that even as we move towards more notionally realistic games, they can put being a game to the forefront, put you on rails through a cleverly designed path, and make the most of the ability to design an enthralling unreal experience that is different each time.
