Suberbike World Championship is, unsurprisingly, a motorbike racing game. It lets you compete in either a whole season or individual races, and has a host of information and resources for superbike racing fans. I didn’t really look at these in much details and now don’t have the option of doing so due to the problems I will go into later.

First impressions of the game were very good. There are two main racing modes, “Arcade” and “Simulation”. Arcade is basically the same as a simulation with all the driving aids turned on and realism effects turned off. In simulation mode, you can vary the amount of assistance you get with the race – i.e. racing assistance – and also set the realism levels, such as whether it is possible for the engine to fail, and various weather effects. Number of laps etc and other racing options can also be changed. The races themselves put you on a relatively rapid learning curve, but the AI of the computer-controlled racers is at a pretty good level, and with a bit of perseverance you’ll soon be finishing near or at the top. However it doesn’t get easy quickly, so it’s still a challenge after some extended play.

The graphics are a bit of a mixed bag – the roadside objects are quite simple (though when you’re zipping past them as speed this isn’t a problem!), while the backgrounds are almost photographic quality. The bikes and riders are nicely rendered though, and the texture of the track itself is very realistic. It does give you quite a good impression of speed, and the tracks are different enough to keep things interesting. It would have been nice if there’d been more than 13 tracks, but that’s apparently how many are in the real Superbike World Championship circuit. There are a number of different views; as usual I found the “just behind that racer” view easiest to race with, and “racer’s eye view” giving the most intense feeling of speed. The engine sound effects are fine, and there are some good quality dance tracks playing in the background.

While I enjoy car racing games on the computer, there really is nothing quite like weaving through the other racers in a motorcycle racing game. You lean as you turn and this gives you an extra sense of really “being there” since you will probably find yourself leaning into the curves too while sitting at the computer! Yes I know, I did that with Super Hang On too… but this is a much more realistic game than that coin-op classic. A lot of research went into making this game very accurate technically, from the track data to the superbike handling, and it shows. (Even though - I admit it - I mostly played it in Arcade mode.)

However, after all those positive comments, now comes the really difficult bit – giving this game a rating. You see, while it worked fine before I upgraded my graphics card. Technical support at Sold Out Software (the picture here is of the original release by Electronic Arts, Sold Out Software have re-released it as a budget title) suggested reinstalling my drivers and DirectX, but this hasn’t helped. Unfortunately there is no way of knowing exactly what the problem is and how much it might affect other users; the best I can do it give you the system specs that it worked on and that it didn’t:

It worked fine on:

nVidia GeForce 4 MX
Original nVidia drivers
DirectX 9.0b

It refused to work on:

nVidia GeForce 5500 FX
Latest nVidia drivers
DirectX 9.0c

(On the latter I get an error message “error creating Z-buffer surface” whenever I try to load the game.)

Also, even when the game was otherwise working fine, when I played the game as a season the game always crashed at track 10. This problem remained unresolved and now, because of the other problem, is irresolvable.

While I could play it, I really enjoyed Superbike World Championship, and was thinking in terms of 4, maybe even 5 stars. Now I can’t play it of course, so the rating must be less. If at all possible I would advise trying it out before you buy, or at least making sure you have the option to return it and get a refund / exchange if it doesn’t work. (This is somewhat unlikely to be the case with a PC game but you never know if you don’t ask!) If it works on your system and you like racing games you are sure to enjoy this game, but with the bug before my graphics card upgrade, and especially since then, I can’t really recommend it.

(It's probably a better bet if you have an older computer - the system specs are very low indeed - only 32Mb RAM, 1Mb graphics card, and a 100MHz CPU as minimum specs.)


For a good budget racing game, I would recommend Colin McRae Rally 2, also from Sold Out Software.


Recommended: No