Title: MotoRacer
Genre: Racing
Players: Two (Split Screen).

Well, we finally seem to get a half decent Motorbike racing game.  
For fans of arcade type racers, this game's for you.  For fans of 
dirt bike racing, this game's for you.

Graphics/Animation:
Excellent frame rate with great graphics and ultra cool track design 
pretty much sums up my opinion of this category.  Your treated to 10 
tracks that have hills that can give you serious air time, long 
straights that give you the opportunity to catch up to other bikes, 
valleys that give you a good sensation of speed and pretty good road 
side graphics (houses, buildings, bridges, etc).  The animation seems 
to stick to 30 FPS with a few exceptions when lots of bikes are on 
screens on some of the tracks which it will go down VERY slightly 
(ie: it does NOT get in the way of the gameplay).  Pop up?  Sure 
there's a bit, but always very far down the track, so you don't see 
a wall appear in a tunnel right in front of you (a la Daytona Saturn).  
If anyone's got complaints with this product, it should not be in 
this area.

Graphic/Animation rating: Tres Cool

Sound/Music:
Fairly good sound, but not great.  Put it this way, although the bike's 
do kind of sound whinny, it doesn't make me want to shut the sound off.  
Same thing with the track announcer.  It seems his samples are fairly 
low quality, but they've added nice echo to it so it's not too bad.  
The game also lets you change the sound level individually for ambient, 
music, moto sfx and voices, so you can't complain one is too high or 
too low: you decide.  For high end Surround users, the game does support 
Dolby surround.

Sound rating: Above average

Options:
The game has 3 levels of difficulty with a nice system of unlocking all 
tracks (with reverse), modes of play (like pocket bikes).  Supports two 
players via horizontal/vertical split screen (no linkup) with a pretty 
good frame rate (I thought).  Please keep in mind I only tried split 
screen on one track, one race, so I don't know if there's more slow down 
on other more intense tracks.  One negative, two player is duel style, 
no cpu bikes.  To me, this can get boring REAL fast if one guy crashes 
(even if there is a catch up option... for cheaters! eheh)

Options rating: s'okay

Control:
I tried the control with both the digital and DAP controllers and let me 
tell you the game's pretty cool for both controllers.  Yes, the game does 
support true analogue, so you can move the stick slightly and the bike 
responds slightly.

Control Rating:  Tres cool

PC to PSX conversion:
Many people will tell you the DirectX version beats the crap out of the 
PSX version, and they may be right.  Me?  Well, I find the graphics, 
animation, sound and gameplay more than match up to the PC version except 
for 2 areas.  Although the Playstation version has a split screen mode not 
found in the PC version, the PC Moto Racer does have CPU controlled bikes 
in it's multi player modes which I think add so much to the game.  As well, 
after 1/2 dozen races, I noticed something pretty sad in the port over.  
Where the PC version supports a total number of 12 or 24 racers at the same 
time (let's say 1 human, 11 or 23 CPU controlled bikes), the PSX
version only supports a total number of 8 (1 human, 7 CPU).  Thus, when you 
race on the PSX version, you seem to go through long segments where you don't 
see any other bikes, while on the pc I found I was always battling other 
bikes on the road to victory.  Of course, with the PSX version, you get the 
nice theater feeling with your 'station plugged into a big tv as opposed to 
a crappy small monitor (as well as a hell of a lot cheaper!), but I felt 
this was important to point out as this does affect the gameplay.

Overall: Pretty good (7/10)

This game makes me wonder what it could have been, but instead I'm stuck 
reviewing what it is.  Well, it's a fun arcadish racing game, with lot's of 
variety in it's spectacular tracks but with an ok 2 player mode and (IMHO) 
an insufficient amount of CPU racers on the tracks.

Rob C.