by Robin White

Created on: May 19, 2008   Last Updated: March 14, 2012

For some, video games are less a hobby and more a daily ritual. Those of us who grew up on Half Life, GTA, Gran Turismo and (let's be honest) the Pokemon series. And as a result, I love a world that lets me review games for money, I love coming online for find more games that I can get paid to play and write about. But all of that was ruined today. Why? Autocross Racing.

I open the game and am greeted with the standard 'Our game is awesome, here's your trial period, buy buy buy!' screen that I've come to expect. Nothing to grab me so far, a collection of tedious looking screen shots and a list of claims. 'Awesome physics based racing' being the first. Well for a start, all racing is physics based. And I doubt there's going to be a lot of Awe floating around. I'm then told, in a glee filled, exclamation mark riddled font that there are ten different tracks. Stopping here for a moment, I was puzzled. Ten tracks? Is that all? For $19.99? The most puzzling claim was 'Use Pit Stops for repairs!'

Being more at home with a Nintendo than a Nissan, cars were never really my bag, but surely you always use pit stops for repairs in a racing sim? Correct me if I'm wrong here.

So to begin, we have some general standard screens shots and a few less than inspiring selling points. Oh, dear...

But now, to press Play. Time to get on into this game and take a big meaty bite out of Autocross Racing. Yup. Right now. Here it comes...

Once your past the loading screen that is. No brownie points won there either. Especially seen as the car I'm given to race with has as much to do with the loading screens picture of a corvette as Al Qaeda has to do with Santa Claus.

As you'd expect from a top-down view racing sim, the up arrow is forward, left is left, right is right and so on, with left Ctrl employed as a turbo boost for the blue near-wreck they've given you to drive. I'm informed by the options screen that the down arrow is brake, but as this seems to have no affect on my car what so ever, this can be safely ignored. Saying which, none of the controls seem to really correlate with what they're supposed to be doing. Give this game ten minutes and you'll be grinding your teeth as your car spins, seemingly at random as you try to turn left. I turned the difficulty right down at this point and found that the only difference this made was to make the computer controlled cars drive slightly slower. This was no help to me what so ever, as even a slow car covers more distance than a spinning

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