** Maggie review / 508 words **
Moon Games
This long awaited game from Polish developers, Crac, finally makes its debut in England - Chris Holland takes a look...

Regular Maggie readers may remember a preview of a game called Moonspeeder which appeared in Maggie 18. Well things have moved on in several respects since then. The programmers created a full commercial version of the game, then there was a follow-up, Moon Games, which was also distributed commercially. Originally this was handled by Compo, but the rights returned to the programmers after Compo closed down. The programmers decided to release the game as freeware to the pleasure of many and the dismay of a few!

Following on from Moonspeeder, Moon Games has good presentation, with extra credits and intro sequences compared with the original game, The game starts up with a title sequence featuring an overhead view of the track, as seen in some amusement arcade racing games. There is more music in this version than in the earlier demo. I selected the championship game.

Here you'll find a curious little sub-game - you race around a hall of reflective textures as a motorised sphere and success in this determines your qualifying position in the main game. Damon Hill and Michael Schumacher might have a bit to learn here!

As far as the main game is concerned there haven't been many changes since Moonspeeder. It remains the Falcon's answer to the classic SNES F-Zero game and the main action has not changed at all. You can still get a buzz racing around the texture mapped tracks in your polygonal moonbuggies and all the features seen in MoonSpeeder are here along with some extras. The motion around the track is smooth, even on a standard 16MHz Falcon030. There's also an option to use an accelerator if fitted.

Heavy use is made of textures and some advanced 3D forms during the game and it hangs together nicely. There's also a two player mode, played in split screen mode - similar to the classic Atari arcade game.

Moon Games is a much larger program than its predecessor, requiring six disks - presumably to contain all the extra track data and other extras. If you were frustrated by the earlier demo version which didn't allow you to play the full championship season you can finally give it a try.

Moon Games is an all to rare Falcon blockbuster which sits awkwardly in a sea of useful but tiddly little proglets. Finally, before we cut to the ratings, let's give special thanks to the programming team (Crac et al) for allowing this game to escape as freeware after their commercial release didn't happen. Let's hope this won't put Crac off and we see another blockbuster released by them shortly.
Ratings:
Graphics: 91%
Impressive for a game of this type, you're left in no doubt this is a Falcon only game
Sonix: 83%
Well chosen music and in-game sound samples
Playability: 90%
A decent 3D racer with enough added to it to prevent it becoming repetitive
Overall: 89%
Well worth the considerable disk space!