[inline:1] Pylon Racing is one of those sports so far ‘out there’ that most people have never heard of it. Mostly inaccessible due to cost and the need for a severe death-wish, the idea is simple: strap yourself into a souped-up aeroplane and race a bunch of like minded mentalists around a course delineated with pylons at speeds of up to 500mph. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to realise that this is a dangerous sport for people with serious amounts of cash.

The game’s appeal is immediately obvious to anyone who’s dabbled with flight sims. The reaction of a ‘normal’ person to a flight sim is almost always the same: jam the throttle on full, take-off and head for the nearest city or bridge for some low level daring, desperately trying to thread the realistic and unresponsive camel of an aeroplane through the eyes of the abundant steel and concrete needles.

Immersion

The game thrusts the player into its world by creating a believable and smooth-moving environment. There are some nicely done reflections of the environment in the surface of the waterways, snaking their way through the valleys, which adds to the sense of space but it’s the little touches that cement the illusion for example, as an opponent passes, there is a distinct sonic boom, followed by some violent controller vibration as he makes you eat jet-wash - great stuff.Strange, then, that this simple risk vs. reward adrenaline trip hasn’t been explored more fully in other games. With the notable exception of TLL (Tornado Low Level) on the venerable Spectrum, NGEN Racing sticks out as probably the only pure-bred ‘balls to the ground’ flying game ever made.

The game hinges entirely around one simple, but inspired gameplay hook: your plane’s engine efficiency depends directly on altitude. Fly high and the engine produces hardly any thrust at all, resulting in a massive drop in speed. Nail it to the deck and the engine propulsion increases dramatically, propelling the player into the screen at a frightening rate of knots. It’s a design masterstroke that makes NGEN one of the most demanding games ever conceived.

Each race in NGEN has six competitors and is fought out over a course,several kilometres long, that wends its way through hills, canyons, bridges and buildings. The boundaries of the course are marked by strobe lights, forming a reasonably wide channel to fly within. The course is also dotted with checkpoints, consisting of two large solid towers that should be flown through, although you are allowed to miss one of these before being disqualified. To prevent too much corner cutting between checkpoints, the game only allows you to stray from the course boundaries for three seconds, anymore than this and the autopilot is engaged, taking you back to the course at a pedestrian pace. This system, allows for a small degree of shortcutting (provided your plane is fast enough), screw up, however, and the result is almost always last place.

fluffy dice

NGEN mode is sort of a ‘lite’ version of the Gran Turismo concept. Planes can be purchased and upgraded to a limited extent through funds won in the single club race and championship events. There’s also a series of time attack trials, to tackle and licence tests, the latter permit access to the faster and more difficult plane classes. All of the aircraft are based on real fighter jets, from across the globe, with many of the more striking military designs still distinguishable, despite the low polygon models.Two control settings are offered, Beginner and Pro, with a vast difficulty gulf between them. In beginner, the game helps you out by levelling the craft for you, so it plays more like a regular racing game. Shift the stick to the left or right to make a turn. Centre the stick and the plane rights itself. You still have to control the pitch of the plane mind, but the whole experience is quite forgiving. Although the game is playable in this mode, it really doesn’t feel like flying an aeroplane and there are a wealth of advanced moves that can’t be pulled off without switching to the Pro handling model. The pro model hands over complete control of the ailerons to the player. Shift the stick and the plane banks; centre it and the angle of banking remains the same, exactly like a real plane! Pro mode also introduces quick rolls. By using L1 and R1: the plane can be flicked onto its back or through a 360 in a split second, useful for negotiating some of the more closely packed corners or collecting double helpings of afterburner juice and health by flying inverted through power-up rings scattered through the course. Both models allow for the use of a rudder, which is absolutely critical for micro adjustments in course, or for adjusting the pitch of the nose slightly through a banked turn.

[inline:5]Taking all this into consideration, it quickly becomes apparent that NGEN in Pro handling mode is absolutely bastard-hard. Car racing games already present a stiff challenge to most gamers, but the addition of the extra height dimension and aeroplane controls means that most players will flounder around helplessly out of control for a good half hour, before it starts to click into place. Even once the controls are down pat, the pain doesn’t end, because the racing is very close, with the CPU pilots hardly putting a wing wrong.

Just when you think you’re getting the hang of racing NGEN style, the game has a sting in its tail. Once progression from trainer to the fighter aircraft has been earned, weapons are introduced. That’s right, so now you have to think about pitch, yaw, roll, thrust, afterburner, altitude, bearing, weapon choice (including counter measures) and firing all simultaneously. I’m sure the pilots in the RAF can handle this, but honestly the result is brain meltingly intense and perhaps a step too far. Still it’s always possible to stick to the trainer class.

2-Up

Bored of the one player game? Then grab hold of a gifted gamer for some serious head to head competition. The games arcade mode has options for two split screen playing styles. The first is a straight race on any of the tracks with only the two of you competing and the second is a sort of bizarre free roaming aerial sport where you have to capture a ball and carry it to a number of scoring zones whilst the other player is trying to shoot you down. The graphics engine holds up well under the additional stress.Progressing through the game is rather unstructured, since a raft of tracks and championships are available from the off. Other than personal improvement and purchasing new planes, there is little to drive the player forward through the game. An open structure like this works well in Gran Turismo, where the game is substantially easier and there is a vast amount to do and purchase, but with the limited selection on offer here and the ludicrously steep learning curve, a more regimented and metered approach would have been welcome.

The game pushes the Playstation to the absolute limit. The scenery sometimes seems to change shape as you approach, but who cares or has time to really notice when you’re doing a thousand miles per hour, twenty foot of the ground, with a missile up your tail pipe. Boy, does this thing shift and the graphics engine still has enough in reserve to add in some stunning effects, like vortices spooling from the wingtips of the aircraft and dust and water kicked up from the ground when you’re really in the zone. There is something magical about executing a turn with your wingtip mere inches from the ground and then hitting the afterburners to fly under a bridge, all to the backing track of some ‘banging’ club tunes.

[inline:7]However, NGEN could have benefited greatly from more graphics processing power from its host machine. The problem is, with the epic speed and proximity to the ground, the player is looking to the horizon to navigate and the Playstation struggles to deliver enough graphical detail to help the player pick out the visual cues required. It’s a problem that doesn’t make the game unplayable, just slightly uncomfortable in places, with most of the courses requiring a few runs before they can be traversed reliably.

NGEN Racing is a very unusual game from a small development studio (Curly Monsters) whose only other game - Quantum Redshift - clearly indicates that they’ve had to go for a more mainstream approach of late. It’s difficult to see a game building on the NGEN concept ever being released in the modern gaming climate - for one thing, it’s simply too hard. This is regrettable because it’s a good game that can hold its head high as a genuine innovation in the arcade racing genre.