Price: £34.99 Players: 1-online System requirements (rec.): Windows 98/2000/XP/Me Pentium 3/AMD Athlon 500Mhz (1Ghz) 128Mb RAM (256Mb for WinXP) Hard disk space: 2.23Gb 32Mb GeForce2 video card or comparable DirectX 9 (included) Back in 1982, at the age of 10, Tron was a film for me which changed my life. Not only was I at an impressionable age, although I can still be impressed at 31, but a fascination with computers and a love of the look of the film just made me want to jump into the cinema screen. This was so much so, that when there was a competition held throughout the schools in the country to win a prize by summarising the movie in 100 sentences I got to work. For the life of me, though, to this day I can't remember or work out why I never actually entered the final draft into the competition, although the fact the prize was for the school and I'd get nothing personally was probably the main reason. Also, when time came to make that year's Xmas want list of things which I didn't have a hope in hell of getting, I wrote on it, "One of those computers that made Tron". Well, it's the only time of the year you get to make such a list... Talking of not having a hope in hell of getting something, if you have a PC with just the minimum specification listed above you won't have much luck in running this. It runs great on the PC I use which is a Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 MX440, although at first I was getting a jittery effect that I first noticed while playing initially on the light cycles. Effectively, I was getting a 'blip' every second, regular as clockwork, for a reason I couldn't fathom. It made the game 'jump', if that's the right word, at that frequency. I turned the settings down to as low as they could be, but it was only when I set the resolution down to 800x600 that it was resolved, although once I'd overcome this hurdle I found I could increase it back to 1024x768 and still watch it on my TV, and ramp the settings back up - including the gorgeous glowing effect, and it still ran perfectly. Given the pressure this will put on your system though, I'd recommend you reboot and shut down anything unnecessary before playing otherwise you'll still notice the occasional stutters. However, it's worth taking such steps since all the effort is up there on the screen.

But about this game, continuing on from the movie and coming from the same director, Tron 2.0 places you in the role of Jet Bradley, son of the film's Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner, who reprises his Tron role in vocal form here and who I haven't seen since being shot dead early on in the Christian Slater comedy, Kuffs, although he's part of the Babylon 5 cast too). Also using their voice here, as Ma3a (Ma-three-a), is Cindy Morgan, Lora/Yori in the movie, and X-Men actress and model Rebecca Romijn-Stamos as Mercury. The plot tells us that Alan's disappeared under suspicious circumstances linked to his research, so as Jet you must go into the digital world and look for those answers, uncovering a sinster plot spinning out of control that threatens to corrupt one reality and forever change another. Translated into English, what this means is that you'll be playing a first-person shooter in the Tron environment, killing baddies in red after which you can access their core dump (pick up energy and ammo left behind, although you'll also find these in red and green circular icons dotted about), roam around and access archive bins (containers of power-ups) to get energy to jump higher and do all kinds of other things. Similar happens for weapons, transfer rate and efficiency. Later on, you'll be told things like your "Y-amp subroutine has become infected", which means you'll have problems jumping until you've got that sorted out. Pressing F1 brings up the equivalent of a hard drive with "bad blocks" that need resolving with a quick defrag. At first it looks, and probably sounds from this review, that it's quite complex to get used to implementing things in the required manner but it does come to you sooner than you think. In fact, if you're a fan of the film you'll buy this game and you'll find it's easier to play it than to describe it, since describing it makes it sound like a PC manual.

What was that other element of the movie that made it such a must-have? Yes, the light cycles. Here, there are levels aplenty in which you can play up to 8 other bikes all zooming along at top speed, albeit at a slow one for the early sections. The more bikes there are, the sooner many of them will be dispensed with, or 'derezzed'. If you move your mouse while playing this part, sure it'll look cool as the elevation of the track's camera is cycled between the flat plain and directly above, you'll probably die as you know you should really have it halfway between so you can see realistically what's going on. Die in a light cycle race - as you often will - and you'll be told such one-liners as "You'll address those bugs in the next patch?" and, in the main game, "If that was a user, I'm shareware!". And I'm sure in another part of the game I was told, "Looks like you fucked up!". Then again, the game does have a '12' rating.

"So, are we all agreed that red's not really our colour?"

By far and away, the best thing about Tron 2.0 is the graphics. These are clearly worthy of a 5/5 score whether it's the glowing lights, the slo-mo falling of the obstacles on the bridge near the start of the game, the disc trails, the perfect replica of the Tron environment - at least as good as it can be without a Cray supercomputer - or the mirror effects and shimmering green of the light cycle tracks. The sound is also effective and I can find no fault with it, but it doesn't impress as much of the visuals. In playing the game, it can seem at times like a standard FPS with puzzles and how pissing the bad guys off makes them go and get their mates, but the Tron aspect brings it through and sustains interest, showing that it can do for games based on Tron what Star Wars games have done for that franchise. In closing, Buena Vista Interactive can be proud that, finally this year, after Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, The Hulk and Enter The Matrix, this is the first game based on a movie which actually delivers what it promises.

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Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2003.