Super Chase H.Q.

"H.Q." Stands for "Highly Questionable"...

User Rating: 3 | Super H.Q. Criminal Chaser SNES

By so_hai | Review Date: January 3, 2008

"Super Chase H.Q." presumably adopted the "super" pre-fix especially for the Super NES platform. The original game, with its semi-cult status, had been floating around on every system you can just about think of before this. As in "Battle Out Run" (1989), in the original "Chase H.Q.", you took the third-person view of a car, racing and battling across an on-going road or highway as you hunted down a pre-determined car. Of course, like most arcade-racers, you were restricted by a more and more demanding time-limit in both of these games.

"Super Chase H.Q." played with this format a little bit, and the first thing I noticed was the last thing I expected. You are now INSIDE the car, looking over the shoulder of the driver, complete with the dashboard and rear-view mirror. Now, your game-screen is viewed through the windscreen of the car. All the action is played out in front of you in a more shallow perspective. But what this really means is that your game-screen is now irritatingly small.

Controlling the car in Chase H.Q. games has always been noticeably more difficult than it should be, and "Super" upholds this gaming legacy to the utmost. Again, I can't express how annoying I find sprite-based racers, what with their round-about programming techniques at creating a vanishing-point and respectable sense of scale on which to drive. The "pop-up" (a more modern term applied to 3D-graphics, I know) is always so appalling in these types of racers as the requirement of creating enough scaled sprites to represent the increasing distance is too high for these old systems. What you have instead is a sense of big block-like "cars" suddenly in your way; constantly. It's not fun.

You have to learn the games idea of how close things ARE, and not how close things LOOK. And this is not something I was not prepared to invest my time in. When a game has such mediocre graphical and sonic production values, I kind of give it a chance to win me over with its gameplay. But, I'm afraid "Super" passed up on this chance, passed it up very quickly, and I never really imagine going back to this one.

The best part of these games was beating the hell out of criminals' cars, and here "Super" doesn't really impress either. It's all so routine, and doing it all from what feels like the back-seat is quite underwhelming. I do not recommend this title, rather, stick to SNES titles such as "Biker Mice From Mars", or :Super Mariokart" – although the latter is in a different sub-genre, and a VERY different class.