The FM Towns conversion of Taito‘s classic arcade game, Chase HQ, looks great and plays well, and is also considerably easier than the arcade original, which may appeal to some. It was published by Ving in 1991 in Japan only.

You play a cop in hot pursuit of a number of criminals in high performance cars and must ram them off the road, after catching up with them. You have a limited amount of time to locate them, then are given a time bonus, and another limited amount of time to damage them enough so that they stop. Hitting them with your car displays their damage bar on screen and the idea is to fill the bar to the top by ramming them enough so that their car bursts into flames. At which point another couple of hits should be enough to make them stop. Your car doesn’t seem to get damaged though!

When you’re driving you must shift into high and low gears to maintain top speed, and you also have a limited number of nitro boosts available to you which are shown in the bottom left of the screen. You can also brake to lower your speed (if the corner you’re taking is too sharp for the speed you’re going). Crashing into other road traffic will slow you down, and hitting roadside objects will make your car spin and stop, which should be avoided if possible. You’ll have to accelerate to top speed again, which consumes valuable time, if that happens. If you do run out of time the game will end, but you can continue from the last level.

Occasionally the road will fork, giving you the option of two directions to go in. The graphics unfortunately do go a bit weird during these road splits, although thankfully they’re brief. There are also a few other graphical glitches that seem to happen on occasion, but the game moves so quickly, and the action is so intense, that they aren’t particularly noticeable. I only noticed them because I took a lot of screenshots and saw some weird road glitches in some of the still images.

Chase HQ on the FM Towns is a fun game to play. It’s relatively close – but not identical – to the arcade original, and features some nice touches, like colour palette transitions as you progress through a course. I didn’t see any road undulations or tunnels (which the arcade version has), nor did I see any helicopters (which feature quite early in the arcade version).

More: Chase HQ on Wikipedia