HYPERDRIVE

Developer: Midway Year: 1997 Genre: racing

The futuristic racing genre has rarely met much success in arcades, and while that’s tragic when you consider games like F-zero AX, it’s nothing less than justifiable for Hyperdrive. The gimmick here is that as well as being able to steer your ship left and right as normal, you also have limited vertical control for flying over obstacles and flying through boost gates, handled by tilting the steering wheel back and forth.

This sounds promising, and the 3D graphics are nice enough for the

era, but the track design is simple and wholly unsatisfying. Obstacles feel more like nuisances than anything else – you spend an awful lot of time moving in a straight line, and even the presence of hazards like asteroid showers can’t enliven proceedings. Pulling off successive boosts by correctly lining up your ship can be satisfying and there’s a convincing sensation of speed, but there’s really no reason to bother with Hyperdrive when so many better alternatives exist in both the home and the arcades.