Tranz Am

Tranz Am is one of the first games Ultimate Play The Game released in 1983, and it fits into sixteen kilobytes — which, given everything it contains, is fairly impressive.

The setting is simply bizarre: the year is 3472, Earth is a parched waste of sand and boulders, and the new measure of prestige is ownership of the eight Great Cups of Ultimate. They are hidden across the continent and guarded by the Deadly Black Turbos. You have a supercharged red racer and a mandate to collect all eight before the fuel runs out.

The game is a top-down view of an enormous plain you drive across freely in any direction. You get instruments that hint at where the cups are and fuel pumps where you have to refill. The Black Turbos chase you and your only weapon against them is your own car — you ram them. Fuel is permanently scarce, so the game is not really about racing but about budgeting: how far you can still reach, whether a detour to a pump is worth it, and when running is better than fighting.

The controls are typically Ultimate and strange today: turn anticlockwise on Z, C, B and M, clockwise on X, V, N and symbol shift, accelerate on the top row, brake on the middle one. You get used to it, but it is not intuitive.

The criticism of Tranz Am has always been the same: the environment is visually monotonous and after half an hour the sand blurs together. The ZXDB user score sits around 7.5 out of ten — good, but clearly below Atic Atac or Jetpac. This is smaller, simpler Ultimate, though still a game with an idea of its own.