Mastertronic‘s Action Biker was a well-known budget hit on the Commodore 64, and it was also released for Atari 8-bit home computers, in 1985. Both the C64 and Atari versions were bundled together as a dual release.

The game is similar to the C64 version, and includes a rendition of Rob Hubbard‘s famous tune, that plays throughout the game as you ride your bike around the scrolling isometric landscape.

You play as Clumsy Colin (a character from the British comic, Buster), and the aim of the game is to collect various items that are scattered around the park, in order to enter a drag race at the conclusion of the game.

You must avoid crashing, and are given five lives with which to complete your task. If you run out of fuel, or the bonus timer reaches zero, you also lose a life. Visiting the gas station will refill your fuel, but there’s nothing you can do about the bonus timer, other than: get a move on!

Just like the C64 version, Action Biker is fun to play (to a degree) because it is open-ended and fairly simple to get to grips with, but completing the game is a real challenge. The items appear randomly, and it’s not clear exactly how many you have to collect.

The Atari version of this game isn’t quite as good as the C64 version, IMHO, but it’s not far off. Action Biker is more of a “distraction” game, than something that you’d play seriously, but it’s an entertaining distraction, nonetheless. For a short while, at least.

More: Action Biker on Wikipedia