On the right track

By Peter Eley

Superbike World Championship

****

PC

EA Sports

(G) $99.95

EA is usually right on track with its sports simulations and Superbike World Championship is no exception.

It is graphically stunning, features accurate models of superbike tracks and has had lots of technical input from last year's champion, Ducati.

And for those real leather-clad petrolheads, it features all the bikes - the Ducati 916, Honda RC 45, Kawasaki ZX7R, Yamaha YZF and the Suzuki GSXR.

Even if you weren't born to ride, Superbike is still a very playable game. I installed it, clicked the Play Now option and seconds later was guiding 150 horses of Ducati down the Laguna Seca.

The game is well suited to a joystick - much more so than car-race games which really need a wheel and pedals.

A touch right or left sends you banking that way, while pushing forward accelerates and pulling back brakes. The setup sensed my novice status and gave me autochange gears and the lowest difficulty setting.

Even so, keeping on track took some getting used to, and you can count on an hour to 90 minutes to get to the stage where you can mount a serious challenge to the Aaron Slights of this world.

If there's a flaw, it's here. The computer-controlled riders didn't seem to pose too much of a threat, and perhaps the artificial intelligence could be a touch smarter.

Graphically it's great, even on my fairly ordinary 4Mb 3D card. Screen shots from a 3Dfx system are simply stunning.

Required: Pentium 166, 32Mb Ram, 2D 4Mb video card. A Pentium 233 and an 8Mb 3D graphics card are recommended.

Bookshelf 2000

****

PC

Microsoft

$129.95

Cross yourselves - it's the 2000 word. Why can't Y2K just be called 1999b, anyway?

Bookshelf 2000 won't do you any harm. It's a good package which fills the gap between a basic thesaurus and spellchecker and a high-end encyclopedia.

In essence, it's a set of tools which home users, business people and even professional writers can draw on to add a final polish to their work. Memory is unreliable and writers - from students to journalists - often spend time checking facts they are a bit woolly about. Bookshelf 2000 is designed to be a point-and-click quick answer to that problem.

It features lists of synonyms, definitions, quotations, facts and figures, a cut-down version of Microsoft Encarta, style guide, Web links and an atlas.

Although you can run it from the CD drive, it's designed to be dumped on to your hard drive and run from there - if you afford 650Mb of disk space.

* Send your comments e-mail to peter_eley@herald.co.nz