Fire and Forget 2 - Sega Master System

Vrooom! Dashing along the road blowing everything up is my idea of fun (I've got an Uzi attached to my Escort). This game gives a real feeling of speed, and the excellent scrolling helps to add atmosphere to the challenge. With so many factors to consider - collecting fuel pods, steering around the corners, and destroying anything silly enough to get in your way - the action remains fast and furious throughout. The end-of-level baddies present a tough fight, and not an insurmountable one; and I find myself constantly distracted by the rather pretty parallax-scrolling clouds! This game isn't the greatest ever, but it's lots of fun and one of the best driving shoot 'em ups on the Sega.

I prefer this to Battle Outrun and Chase HQ! In those games you just had to bump the enemies off the road - here you can let rip with machine guns and blow up everything that gets in your way! The action is very fast and pretty tough, almost to the point of being off-putting at first. However, once you get used to the speed of things, you start getting into the action and rise to the considerable challenge. The graphics and sound are both brilliant - the road is particularly smooth and convincing - and the update on the sprites is excellent. A must for addicts of highway violence!

Asides from the dreadful title (it sounds more like game about fire-fighting); this was a pretty decent attempt into giving a bit of speed and thrills for the aging SMS. Given the fact that this was developed by a European team (I believe that Titus is a French based team) it really stood out at the time as the most of the good stuff was coming from SEGA directly.

The speedy thrills of the car and the ability to destroy whatever is in front of you was quite novel at the time and I certainly recall spending quite a bit of time mastering the levels just to see what was waiting for my further on the game (my fragile memory recalls that the later levels were quite tough and so it wasn't a game for the faint hearted). The sound and music is also quite impressive as one has to bear in mind that we are talking about the master system here, the tunes are quite bouncy and goes quite well with the sound effects of exploding cars.

Bright visuals with a good feel of speed (the help coming from smooth scrolling) made this a very enjoyable purchase for me. I recall also trying to make some enquiries about Fire and Forget 1 as I enjoyed this so much. Being a car game like spy hunter has obviously helped this genre develop (with countless car games with guns now being mass-produced), and should this series be revived (I believe that Titus themselves are no longer with us), then it would be sadly loss amongst the waves and waves of "me-too" type scenarios.

Overall, this was a good solid game which showed that the master system was not a flimsy powerless console and as I mentioned already, the fact this was European developed should deserve our respect.

- Jim Wai