One of the nicest aspects of being an Amiga owner towards the latter part of the last century was that you could look at just about any outstanding software title on another system and smugly say, "Yes, that's very nice but it's not quite as nice as the Amiga version of... (insert title here)."

This phrase was widely used in conversation with Atari ST owners, whose lack of blitter chip and decent sound invariably meant ST conversions of games were decidedly inferior. There was one exception though, and that was one of the finest racing games created by man - Super Sprint. It was a top-down game where little cars sped around circuits and it was the inspiration behind Micro Machines, Supersonic Racers, Circuit Breakers, etc. What Super Sprint had in its favour, which its creative descendents lacked, was that all the action took place on a single screen so there was none of this 'trailing car being picked up because it got left behind' malarkey. This might sound trivial, but having all the cars on-screen at all times resulted in much more fluid gameplay. The Atari ST conversion of Super Sprint, just like the arcade game, could also accommodate three players.

Activision/Electric Dreams, who published the game, apparently didn't have a licence to create an Amiga version (or so they told me) and my, us Amiga owners who were also fans of the arcade game were mad about that. The ST conversion was absolutely top: it looked like the arcade game, played like the arcade game and sounded like... okay, it sounded pants, but that was down to the ST's limitations rather than the fault of the programmers.

As a result, any top-down, single-screen racing game that came out on the Amiga was eagerly seized upon as soon as it hit the shelves. Would this be the one that would remove the need for me to visit my ST-owning friends? Sadly, there were many false dawns but eight years ago this week saw the release of the closest the Amiga ever came to having a Super Sprint of its own: Indy Heat.