Neighbours - Atari ST (Full Playthrough & Opinion)
6There have been some really odd things to make video games about and this is no exception. To be honest if I was going to come up with something about Neighbours then yeah would end up doing something which has next to nothing to do with the source material. Neighbours is an Australian TV soap that at the moment resides on Channel 5. So how do you turn that into a game? Well just make it into a racer.
The game was made by Zeppelin Games under their Impulze brand in 1991 for the Spectrum, C64, Amiga and finally this ST version. There isn’t really much of a plot other than the cast of Ramsey Street deciding to have a street race to decide whom is the best, with you being forced to play Scott Robinson on his skateboard whilst the rest of the cast uses motorbikes, tractors and various vehicles.
The game is a straightforward race to the finish line trying to keep ahead of your competitors across four different tracks that you have to race twice albeit in reverse.. Being in Australia there are a bunch of hazards on the quiet neighbourhood such as kangaroos and Ostriches running all over the road, vehicles moving backwards and forwards without even looking, to standard traps such as pot-holes and open manhole covers. You can turn off all of the hazards in the options menu as well as turning down the number of rivals from 2-5, there’s also a difficulty selector, however it’s not very clear from the main menu, you’d probably need the manual to identify that the skateboard on the left is the easy mode.
The game starts off pretty well with a good version of the Neighbours theme music on the ST’s music chip, but unfortunately the rest of the game is rather silent asides from the odd sound effect. Visually the game is colourful but there is quite a bit of jerky animation, particularly if you compare it to the Amiga version, which is very smooth in comparison. It looks alright without partially impressing you, but it is certainly not the worst portion of the game.
To move you have to hold down the fire button with the joystick being move the character. The biggest problem is that the controls are too sensitive, it can actually be a problem to make the skateboard go straight because you end up moving 90 degrees instead of 45. You don’t just point the joystick in the direction that you want to go, you have to turn the character by pressing left and right. This sort of control scheme does work if you do it right and it’s just not correct here. It’s also worth mentioning that the hit detection is off and you’ll sometimes hit an object when you have actually missed it. It’s not also particularly fair that if one of your rivals hit you, even if it is from behind, they will always start ahead of you on the road. I can’t tell you how frustrating this is, it’s often worth just keeping right out of their way. More often than not whenever you get hit, you’ll find yourself pointing straight at the side of the road and of course you have the fire button down because you want to accelerate as soon as possible, only to crash into the side and be forced to wait again. Usually crashes come in close proximity to each other , particularly some of these race tracks have really tight straights, along with the environmental hazards make it really just luck whether you’ll be able to steer the skateboard in the right direction to get through the slim gap.
Overall the game isn’t at all fun, it’s not a great racer and not a great tie-in for the source material, and so I’m not sure who to recommend this to.
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