Graphics
Score: 9

As I noted in the introduction Motorhead throws some very varied graphically lush environments at the racers. While the game is limited to just eight tracks (which can eventually be raced in reverse direction), the very unique look goes far in keeping the game fresh after many races. This makes the league a real pleasure to race through. As if the tracks and main environment was not enough, the environment is populated by lamp posts, wind mills, bill boards, and a whole lot more including a Jetsons style hovercraft that whips over your head.

Each track is made up of over 30,000 polygons with 16 bit rendering and graphics out of the box. 3D graphic support is via Glide and D3D.

On a single 12 meg Voodoo 2 board glide offered resolutions of 512x384, 640x480, 800x600 and 1024x768. On a TNT 16 meg board in DS3D the same four resolutions plus 960?? Was offered. On my machine with 64 meg of ram I would get an out of memory error if I tried to run true colour mode in anything over 640x480.

The designers obviously had a lot of fun pushing 3D hardware to the limit with this title by utilizing a features list that includes high precision texture mapping, lens flares, fog, sparks, shadows, smoke, skid marks and light halos and more. All these effects are put to great use on the tracks. There’s still more! The recently updated OEM version (same tracks as the retail version) offers support for trilinear filtering or anisitropic filtering, true colour rendering (TNT owners rejoice) that just has to be seen to believed, triple buffering and 24 bits texture format. All of these features and more are added to the retail version with the 2.2 patch.

I tested Glide on a 12 Meg Creative Labs Voodoo 2 board and most of my DS3D testing on Creative Labs TNT board. Motorhead shines on both boards with the Glide version being somewhat smoother when I was running on an oc Celeron (to 333). The true color rendering of the TNT board comes with a small performance hit on the 333 but runs great at 416mhz. The most annoying thing I found is that load times in true color mode are horribly long taking upwards of 75 seconds to load a track vs 20 seconds for the same track in 16 bit mode. However, the beauty of the true colour mode will have many gamers putting up with the load times.

All of this adds up to give Motorhead an amazing look with fast frame rates. The only way to convey the excellent illusion of speed would be with a movie as still shots cannot do it justice! This is all very critical for an arcade racer which is dependent on effects and speed to captivate the gamer

The view it self can be varied to with Internal Camera, External Camera and TV Camera options along with an option to Switch Camera Between Cars.

Software rendering is ok, but its pales in comparison to the 3D accelerated version.

One thing that is missing is crash damage. With all the graphic power available the designers have implemented some spectacular smashups but the cards don’t smashup.

Multiplayer
Score: 9

Motorhead has an excellent range of multi-player options which add to the longevity of this title. The retail version of Motorhead shipped with 8-person multi-player support via IPX, TCP/IP or modem. Since then, improved multiplay protocol (Winsock) and 12 person multi-player over the internet has been added as well as dedicated server support.

One cool feature is you can spawn as many multi-player versions of the game as you like which should really help to promote online racing.

All you need to do to find people to play with is look for one of the Motorhead Fan sites or head on over to Mplayer. There are also several leagues being run from unoffical sites which you may choose to join. As it turns out, most of the fan sites are based out of Europe where Motorhead’s developers hail from.

I joined a game from a server a found at Barry's World. I also tested the mulitplay option using Mplayer's Motorhead room. Both worked very well. How you get there differs somewhat but once you are there Motorhead features a nice chat window and easy entry into the race. Working from a cable modem I have a hard time investigating lag. For my testing I had no lag problem but to be sure, I talked to a few people I was racing against and they all indicated that lag was not a problem with online racing in Motorhead!

Bottom line - mulitiplayer racing in Motorhead is a blast.