GAME PLAY
GETTING STARTED
GRAPHICS
SOUND CHECK
VALUE

Screamer 2

By Daniel Morris

Summary: More of what made Screamer the cream of the action-racing crop--but not much more.

Screamer set the standard for arcade racing games on the PC with its 1995 debut. Virgin's follow-up is more of the same, gussied up a bit but featuring few new twists and turns.

Screamer 2 has everything that made its daddy a star. From the opening selections of your team and car, you're pumped to go out and lay down some rubber. Once you're off, it's instant tongue-between-teeth time as you wrestle for position with the bad guys. Same setup as before--you champion your team through an international crop of road courses.

The graphics are as intense as before, and Virgin's recommendation of a 2MB Super VGA graphics card is heartily seconded right here. A ton of detail is included in every passing object on the track. Buildings, fruit carts, tunnels, signs--it's all rendered in stylish Super VGA, adding greatly to the visual experience.

Occasionally, the backgrounds can even be distracting, as you speed along and catch sight of some awesome piece of scenery and stare at it--and then slam into a wall. One snipe: the bystanders are drearily flat. They can ruin the whole screen sometimes when you're whipping through a tight turn and your eye settles on the sleepy, superimposed spectators. They should either have been spruced up or deleted entirely.

Multiplayer support is topnotch, as it was in the original. Drivers can go at it over a network or modem. Drivers can go at it over a 4-way network. But as in the original, the computer opponents are tough enough that they provide a huge challenge when trying to advance through the championship mode.

And as you might expect, it's a feast for you peripherals patriots who own every conceivable piece of driving hardware to be had. Of particular use will be a Thrustmaster T1 or T2 steering wheel. Once you've got one, the road is yours. It's impossible to play a game like Screamer 2 and not go absolutely, completely, balls- to-the-wall insane with a wheel in your hands. Adding pedals for gas and brake and a gear shift, you're going to wish you had a racing helmet and goggles on just to complete the effect. 'Course, by then you'll have spent as much money on hardware as you would on a real used car, but hey, how fast could you go in that thing, anyway?

It's really hard to say anything bad about Screamer 2, but then again, it's hard to muster up any overwhelmingly positive sentiments about it, either. All throughout it, there's a sense that something's missing; or, more to the point, that there's nothing here you didn't see in the original Screamer. We'd like to think sequels add to and improve upon their forebears, but you'll be hard-pressed to find any significant differences in gameplay or graphics.

Which is not to say that these qualities aren't first-rate among arcade driving games. They are. The art used to render the passing scenery, particularly in the urban stretches of the California track, is incredible. And the gameplay is as smooth and involving as before.

But it would be hard to differentiate between the two if you saw them running on monitors side by side. If you own the first installment already, I can't see you thinking your money was well-spent on this sequel. If you never got a look at the original, Screamer 2 has more tracks, more cars, more music, and the same thrilling racing, making it a must for fans of arcade racing.