Producer: Digital Integration
Retail Price: £9.95
Author: David Marshall and Rod Swift

Tearing down an ice tunnel at speeds approaching 80mph, where the slightest mistake can write you off, is not a game for those of a nervous disposition.

But that's what Digital Integration's bobsleighing simulation is all about - and perhaps that's bobsleighing for real, too. Digital Integration is a simulations specialist ('advancing the art of simulation') and consulted British bobsleighing champion Nick Phipps for this game.

Phipps is competing for the gold medal in the Winter Olympics in February - and so can you on the Spectrum's Calgary track!

You have a choice of bobs, from amateur to Olympic, and each can be a two-man or four-man vehicle. The better the bob, the faster it goes - but it's also more expensive, and your sponsors have set limits on how much you can spend. The only way to get more cash is to compete and do well.

Before each run, you make decisions about the fitness of your crew and weather conditions. The weather affects a bob run: cold icy conditions require one type of metal runner, warm wet conditions another. Again, however, a new set of runners eats up your funds...

You and your crew have just 50 metres to get the heavy bob started. And humping a huge piece of metal isn't the lightest of tasks, so you need to develop stamina and strength through gruelling fitness training.

At the start line you all get on board, and the timed run begins.

A good push start will help, but after that the player must exercise great skill in driving smoothly. Contact with the ice walls as you bullet down the straights is bound to slow a bob, and travelling too high on a snow bank can make you crash.

Once the finish line has been crossed the bob's brakes can be used to slow the vehicle to a standstill. But if brakes are used on the track proper, you'll be disqualified (and probably damage your bob).

Times are shown every quarter distance and a final time is posted as the finish flag is reached, with a record-time display putting your own achievement into perspective.

There are six real-life venues in each bob class (apart from Olympic) - maps and record times are shown for each venue - and if you choose to compete in a racing season the order of venues can 't be changed.

Still, if you find one course impossible, you can play all the others by choosing a single track at a time - you won't be world champion that way, though.

In each venue you have a practice run and then two competitive runs: win with the lowest accumulated time, and Bob's your uncle. But if you crash on the first run you're not allowed a second - so don't let your attention wander for a moment.

COMMENTS

Joysticks: Kempston, Sinclair
Graphics: simple line drawings create a realistic tunnel effect
Sound: basic beeps (and some machine-code ones too!)
Options: choice of six world championship tracks; one or two players; two-man or four-man bobs; sleigh, runners, even tracksuit colour... you name it, it's a menu

In televised bobsleigh runs there's never a steady view of the track, which makes the shaky graphics of Bobsleigh even more realistic. And though line graphics may seem a bit primitive they work well in a 3-D bobsleigh run! it may take some time to complete your first run, but stick with it, because once you're involved in the moneymaking aspects of winning and the fight for an Olympic gold medal the game really hots up. Bobsleigh mixes skills and'strategies well in a realistic situation.
BYM [94%]

Yet again Digital Integration is after 'the real thing'. Motorbikes are one thing, aeroplanes another - but I bet the producer has got us on this one. There aren't many people who've been bobsleigh-racing and lived to tell the tale, so who knows if Bobsleigh's accurate? But it does give the player a realistic 3-D effect as he zooms (well, it's not really frighteningly fast) down the run. This interesting simulation didn't really move me in my seat, but it did make me realise how hard it is to run a bobsleigh team without going bankrupt!
PAUL [81%]

Digital Integration
£9.95
Reviewer: Nat Pryce

I must admit I was a bit dubious when I received Bobsleigh. I'm not a great fan of simulations as I've always found them on the unplayable and boring side. But I'm happy to say that Bobsleigh has converted me. It simulates "the fast and dangerous Winter Olympic sport" of bobsleigh raing. (Never!) You must buy your bob, train your team, choose which track to race at and guide the bob down the track in the fastest time possible.

Everything must be run to a tight budget. The upkeep of your team must be paid for, as must the fitness training and repairs to your bob. If you race well, your sponsors will pay you more money, but if you do badly or crash, you receive less and less money, until you're bankrupt. Make piles of moolah and you can buy even faster bobs. The top class of bob is the Olympic one, and you can only enter the Winter Olympics and go for the gold medal with one of these.

The problem I usually find with simulations is that you can never see from the main display whet is going on without constantly checking your instrument panel. In Bobsleigh, the graphics, though not stunning, do convey an excellent sense of realism. You can feel the G-force as you whip round a banked corner - you hardly need to check your speedo as the graphics show your speed surprisingly well. You even see the snow being thrown up in your face when you crash!

Like all good games, Bobsleigh takes no time to get into, but ages to master. At first your aim is just to finish each race, but to do well, you'll need to learn how to take each corner, which runners to fit and when to brake at the end. It'll take you some time to become expert, but you'll never be bored - Bobsleigh is one of the most addictive games I've ever played!

Label: Digital Integration
Author: In-house
Price: £9.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Graham Taylor

Scrrissshhhhhhh, scrooosssssssssh. Blarrp. It isn't easy steering Bobsleigh, the merest touch can send the thing spinning into the air and - wummmpfh - another run bites the dust.

Now I can easily understand that bobsleighing, far from being an innocent sort of snowy pastime loved by laughing children, is, in fact, a viciously competitive, utterly macho and staggeringly dangerous sport.

What I was less certain about was whether all that whiteness would look good on a computer game. Snow is a pretty hard thing to capture on the average Spectrum - check out all those skiing games where it just looks as though somebody forgot to draw the backgrounds. The other thing about bobsleighs is that they have a low knob- count. Simulations usually need to be of things with lots of controls - eg helicopters, submarines.

In Bobsleigh - after the hectic initial Daley Thomson style sprint to get in the thing - there are only two controls essentially - left and right. This ought to make it dull.

But it isn't. Digital Integration is nothing if not thorough. True, the controls of the Bobsleigh are simple but the sleigh responds very precisely to the slightest nudge. Getting the thing down the track is an infinitely subtle series of carefully judged nudges on the controls - a constant tension between doing enough to get round a bend without getting into an impossible position to take the one after that.

The basic technical problem of the game - how to give the illusion of hurtling through a gully of sheer ice at more than a hundred miles an hour is very well done. Simple shading effects brilliantly convey both the twists and turns in the ice walls and the illusion of perspective and distance.

There is an element of strategy and management in the game - planning anyway - in the way you must match your selection of runner blades to weather conditions on the run and keep track of your cash. You also need to allocate money for crew training - a special screen that lets you improve your waggle and improve those running starts.

Not winning and bad bobsleighing use up cash quickly conversely if you start raking it in you may decide to up-grade your bobsleigh and go for some serious speed.

Aside from the actual steering there are a couple of other key elements in each run - starting and stopping. Starting - which the real thing involves running along with the sleigh and leaping on to it at the last possible moment is simulated by the good old two-finger left-right (or joystick) waggle - as seen in countless Track and Field games. How deft your waggling is.

Like many of Digital's games, the more you play the more you get out of it. You get to know where and when the left and right swings in the track occur and clip more and more seconds off your time to get closer to the kind of speeds that will begin to earn you money.

You need a little patience - stick with it and get half way good and I think you'll find Bobsleigh utterly captivating.

Ice screaming with Digital Integration.

Nick Phipps is not a name that springs immediately to mind when you're asked to think of a top class sportsman. He is however, currently rated as Britain's top Bobsleigh driver, and has endorsed this latest simulation from Digital Integration.

The player gets a driver's eye view of all the action on six World Championship tracks, and has to fight his way from amateur status to Olympic standard by sheer guts, skill and determination.

Simply learning the controls and winning the odd race is not enough in this game. The player has to compete and do consistently well enough to win the sponsorship money needed for the team's upkeep. Crashing a bobsleigh can be disastrous not only for your chances of a place in the winning top three but can hurt your wallet as well; repairs cost money but lost sponsorships can have you teetering on the brink of bankruptcy - and becoming bankrupt means you'll have to restart the game.

Before you start into serious competition, you can practice each run in whatever order you desire, which is helpful in familiarising the player with problem corners etc. You can then compete against other teams for just the one run which helps to give you an idea of how well you compare to them.

Getting to grips with the runs is, as you'd expect, tough. It takes a keen eye and sharp reactions to read the comers and find the path of least resistance which you need to follow if you're to achieve anything like the speeds needed to earn yourself a place on the leader board. Make sure you consult the weather reports before the start of a race; selecting the wrong runners for the bob' can lose you valuable seconds on a run.

Options to increase your team's fitness are included, and the idea is to waggle your joystick (or use the keys) as fast as possible; combined with having to waggle the joystick at the start of each race (simulates your team running with the bobsleigh to the start line) this can have you feeling physically tired at the end of a season.

Bobsleigh is a thrilling game with enough strategy involved to add another dimension to a highly competent and addictive simulation.

Reviewer: Andy Smith

RELEASE BOX
C64/128, £9.95cs, £14.95dk, Out Now
Spectrum, £9.95cs, Out Now
Ams, £9.95cs, £14.95dk, Dec 87

Predicted Interest Curve

1 min: 60/100
1 hour: 85/100
1 day: 88/100
1 week: 80/100
1 month: 70/100
1 year: 40/100

Amstrad, £9.95cs, £14.95dk
Spectrum, £9.95cs

This simulation succeeds in capturing not only the thrill of hurtling down an ice wall in a metal bullet, but also the crucial elements of strategy. You can race on six different tracks, including the one from the Calgary Olympics. Each track has its own dangers that can send you careering out of control in an instant.

The Spectrum and Amstrad versions have excellent graphics and driving 'feel'. The 64 version isn't as good because of the bad driving controls and jerky graphics. You compete in world championship and Olympic competition using two or four-man bobs. You can alter the bobs runners depending on the weather conditions, increase the team's fitness for faster starts and buy faster bobs if you do well enough to get more sponsorship money. A superb simulation that demands intense concentration and is always a challenge, no matter how often you play it.

MACHINES: C64/Spectrum/Amstrad
SUPPLIER: Digital Integration
PRICE: £9.95 (tape), £14.95 (disc)
VERSIONS TESTED: C64/Spectrum

We've been bob, bob, bobbing along at C+VG since DI's latest game arrived in the office. The programmers, famed for their aircraft and bike racing simulations, have taken a step into the unknown and produced a truly excellent and original game based on this thrilling and dangerous sport.

It puts you in charge of a bobsleigh team out to compete in the Winter Olympics. You train your team, organise the finances, set up the bobsleigh and, finally, take part in races down awesome ice-tracks all around the world.

You can practice or race on individual runs or compete in a whole championship season. You begin each season with a certain amount of sponsorship cash - you win more if you do well in competition. But you're more than likely to end up crashing, damaging your bob and forcing a cash outlay on repairs.

You spend your cash on training your team, getting them into shape or purchasing a new customised team uniform - or even buying a new bobsleigh. You'll need to buy new bobs in order to progress through the skill levels.

Each level requires a different type of bob - ultimately an Olympic standard bob to enable you to compete for a coveted gold medal. You can't enter the Olympics unless you've done well in the World Championship season - proving your racing skills.

The game is menu driven - with attractive info windows setting out the different options of presenting relevant information.

Control of the bob requires a delicate touch on the joystick - violent reactions resulting in a bruising, battering crash! Concentration is essential. You may think it looks easy after watching the built in demo but it 'aint!

Practice makes perfect though - and you get a genuine sense of achievement after completing a run - whatever time you cover the distance in.

The graphics and sound on both versions I've looked at are basic but very effective - you get a real sense of the speed and danger as you career down the claustrophobic ice-lined track, racing around slick ice walls, bumping around corners, speeding under bridges and enduring gut-wrenching highspeed crashes!

Two members of the British Bobsleigh team, Nick Phipps - who once beat Daley Thompson in the decathlon - and Alan Cearns, at present in training for the '88 Winter Olympics, helped out with the design of the simulation - and it shows.

I've never been near a bob - and I reckon this game is about as close as I ever want to get! But DI's usual attention to detail, nice presentation and excellent packaging make Bobsleigh a real Christmas gold medal winner! Here's a few hints and tips on gameplay.

A fast push start is very important and will have a large influence on the finish time. The push start depends on how fast you can rock the joystick up and down, and also on your computer level of fitness.

If your fitness level is given as poor or average it would be a good idea to spend some cash to improve your fitness rating, otherwise however hard you rock the joystick up and down you will never be able to achieve the best possible push start.

Smooth driving produces fast times, so gentle steering adjustments on the joystick will produce faster times than wild excessive steering.

Try to find the natural lines through the corners which require the least amount of corrective steering.

Avoid hitting the side walls because this slows the bob down, The bob is most likely to crash when coming out of a corner late and hitting the side wall hard.

Wrong runners on your sleigh will reduce the grip on the ice. This means you will have to hold over the joystick longer to achieve the same control.

If the air temperature is very cold (eg -8 degrees) the ice surface will be hard and bowed runners (type 4) are best because they cut into the ice for better grip. If the air temperature is warm (eg +3 degrees) the ice surface may be melting slightly and a flatter runner (type 1) will provide better grip.

The brake is only to be used after crossing the finish line to bring the bob to a standstill.

Use of the brake during the run is prohibited because it scuffs up the track and can slow down the competitors still to come.

There are four classes of bob from amateur up to Olympic, the better the bob the faster it will go. Each class of bob is available as a two man or four man bob. The four man bob is faster than the two man and will incur higher maintenance costs The Olympic four man is therefore the fastest bob.

If it's speed and excitement you're after then Bobsleigh won't let you down - get your skates on and beat it down to your games store NOW!