Nigell Mansell World Championship is a truly awesome game and one that brings back many happy child hood memories for me!
Nigel Mansell World Championship is a DOS PC game written back in the early 90's by Gremlin Interactive Software as part of the Nigel Mansell Franchise. This game was a work of genius for its time, with a real time on-screen interactive cockpit, and the famous racing game style of its period.
This game is easily overlooked as a classic, due to its large competition such as games like the Lotus series, Test Drive, Day of the Tentacle and the increasing boom of the FPS games such as Doom.
The menu layout was simple enough, I began playing this game at around the age of 4-5, and I managed to work out the basic principles of the menu layout.
The game play, compared to others in its time, was pretty standard. Fast paced laps, with AI drivers following 3 set patterns of track route (just to spice up the action). The compatibility features of the game also allowed for the use of a joystick to navigate the menus and also drive in the races.
There were two different versions of the game released. A CD version and a floppy disk version (standard of its time). In Europe both were packed together, with the box containing one CD and two floppy disks and the game
manual. The floppy version contained nearly all of the features of the CD version, but cut down on the high quality graphics and many sounds were removed.
Technically the game didn't require alot of processing power, and was able to create a fast paced game play experience on lower end machines.
There was the chance to customize the car, in certain ways such as gear ratio (to my knowlege. I haven't played this game in over 10 years!). There were a selection of tracks, some clearly had more effort put into them than others, such as the Monaco Grand Prix which had the famous tunnel.
Technically based, the game catered for different PC specs, with different graphics mode, and for those posh people with Gravis Ultrasound cards the option of better sound effects (I unluckily had PC speakers and missed a lot)
This is truly a great game, along with many of my childhood favorites and one I still sometimes think about even today, just wishing I could be a kid once more and play this on my old Win 3.1 machine.
Well worth a download for a quick burst of retro racing fun. Also a great game for children!
[8/10]
