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"The most irritating classic game in the world!"

This game is donkey's years old so I'm going to do my best to be objective here. I tried it out again recently (''now'' being 2003 for anyone who's reading this in the far future) because I had fond memories of playing it many years ago and getting tremendously frustrated by the enormous difficulty of the thing.

The plot details are, as ever with 80's budget games, hazy at best. You have a car (the eponymous ''Last V8'') which is red and fast (two almost mutually exclusive concepts in many 80's driving games), and you're stuck 4 kilometres away from your base (why 4km? I don't know). To make matters worse, there's a nuclear bomb about to drop, and patches of the earth are severely irradiated. It's up to you to save... well, your own behind, really.

V8 is a top-down driving game. Sort of. The actual display of your car's instrument panel and various status readouts take up a good three quarters of the screen and, while admittedly impressive to see working rev counters and speedo's in glorious C64-o-vision, it does leave a miniscule window for you to see where on earth you're driving.

The gameplay is essentially a test of how steady your hand is. The slightest clip of a treeside object will see your lovely car bursting into flames and leaving you dead in the forthcoming atomic blast. Cheery. What you have to do is negotiate the road carefully and make your way to your base in the underground bunker, steering carefully around tricky roads and speeding through irradiated areas.

What makes this task somewhat more difficult is the rather peculiar control system. While you initially think it's the standard ''Asteroids'' system (i.e. turn with left and right, push up to accelerate) in actual fact it's somewhat more unnecessarily complicated. Push a direction and your car will accelerate in that direction if it's facing that direction. If it's more than 90 degrees away from that direction, it will turn towards that direction. For example, if you're heading left and you push up, your car will turn to the right, towards the top of the screen.

Confused? Thought you might be. It's this control system that makes what would already be a tricky thread-the-needle exercise into a teeth-gnashing ordeal from Hades' very posterior. It's difficult enough to successfully negotiate the first corner, let alone pull off the flukey performance shown in the demonstration mode.

That said, despite it being incredibly irritating, it has a certain addictive quality. Perhaps it's because you start to feel that it can't possibly be supposed to be that difficult. Perhaps it's the groovy Rob Hubbard music. Perhaps you like the grainy sampled speech of one of the programmers yelling ''V8! Return to base! Immediately!''. Or perhaps it's the little gaming demons tugging at your pleasure centres, telling you that you WILL enjoy this game.

So there you go. By modern standards, it's a big pile of donkey droppings but it does have a retro charm all of its own and its extreme difficulty makes excellent bragging material to other children of the 80's if you ever manage to negotiate the first corner. The Rob Hubbard music is excellent, the graphics are good (for a C64, naturally) and the gameplay is, well, a gigantic pain in the bum really, but who cares really? It's not as if anyone's going to read this review, are they?

If by chance you HAVE stumbled across this review, dig out V8 and see if you can do any better than me. I reached the big 90-degree corner where you have to turn to the south.


Reviewer's Score: 6/10 | Originally Posted: 07/14/03, Updated 07/14/03

From an early age, siblings Richard and David Darling had an interest in computers, and were selling their own games via classified ads in magazines by the early 1980s. Before they founded Codemasters, they were selling games to the UK publisher Mastertronic; the Darlings' first ever racing game was The Last V8, released in 1985 under the M.A.D. label for the princely sum of £2.99.

Set in a Mad Max-style future (in the year 2008!), The Last V8 was a top-down racer with a quirky control system that left some reviewers unconvinced: pushing the joystick at a particular point on the compass caused the car to head in that direction, while braking was achieved by pulling the joystick the opposite way. This resulted in a fun, colourful yet mildly frustrating game that felt more like coaxing a wayward robot around a maze than a conventional racer.

The Last V8 puts you in a pretty enthralling situation. The year is 2008, seven years after World War III and the nuclear winter has just about passed. Civilization was destroyed by the devastating war, but you were working deep underground when it happened and therefore survived. During the time you've spent in the shelter, you worked on a project: The Last V8 which is based upon a car you owned.

Over the years it has been built up and customized to withstand the hostile environment which was once the world. Complete with radiation shielding, turbo engine and computer linked to its station, it's ready to take you out in your search for the remnants of mankind.

However, on your first foray a siren sounds warning you of an imminent strike from delayed action warheads which detonate periodically. You only have a tiny amount of time to get back to the base, and it's up to you to steer the last V8 back to the base.

The screen is divided into two parts -- the car's instrument panel and a scrolling aerial view of the track. The instrument panel has no real significance to the game, it just tells you the speed you're going. The upper half of the screen is the most important, since it is using this that you play the game.

The Last V8 has the same type of control as Paradroid -- if you point the joystick in a direction then the car goes that way. If you want the car to slow down then you have to push the joystick in the opposite direction.

The game starts with spoken message V8 return to base - immediately and you have to get back to the base before the timer reaches zero. WWIII doesn't seem to have been as devastating as we were led to believe since there are still roads the V8 has to religiously follow. If the car goes off the road then it explodes and the game has to be restarted.

If you manage to get to the base within the time limit then you are transported to a second, trickier landscape and the return to the base starts over again.

Despite beautiful graphics and promising scenario, The Last V8 falls down because of it's sheer unplayability. The control is almost impossible to handle. The only problem is the way the joystick is used to move the car. It just doesn't work. When it comes down to it, the only reason I played The Last V8 for the time I did was so I could see the graphics on the rest of the game. The music is very good, yet another Rob Hubbard classic. What really got on my nerves was the speech synthesis before the start of each game. Man, it really grated; too much of this and you'll be reaching for some downers. Though beautifully presented, The Last V8 didn't live up to the graphics its been blessed with. Not a lot of cop I'm afraid.

When I first heard the outstanding music and saw the excellent graphics I thought this was going to be something really special. After trying to play it I decided it wasn't. The Last V8 is totally unplayable due to its immense difficulty. Trying to control the car is difficult. But being forced to drive it at huge speeds to get back to the base safely because of the time limit was just too much -- it would be tricky enough without the time limit. It's a shame MAD couldn't have made the game more playable, especially since it does have amazing graphics and backing track, but as it stands it's a piece of very below average software.

Presentation 58%
Nice demo but no game options and annoying delays.

Graphics 87%
Excellent static display and very good, if flickery, scrolling window.

Sound 91%
Another rockin' Rob Hubbard classic.

Hookability 42%
Initial frustration appeal . . .

Lastability 29%
. . . that is soon quelled by total unplayability.

Value For Money 45%
Cheap, but there are cheaper and better games.

Overall 37%
Disappointing release from Mastertronic.