I'm not aware of too many sailboat racing games currently available on the speccy. (There are at least two others that are MIA and one that is "distribution denied") so I guess fans of the genre don't have a whole lot of choice. In this one, you do have to sit through the rather tedious BEEP-command intro-tune (at least on a real Spectrum). On an emulator, I'm always tempted to switch to "full speed" mode until the tune is completed, or create a snapshot.
However, once the game starts it's a simple case of selecting either 2-player mode, player vs CPU or player vs player vs CPU. In fact the word "man" is used in the game, rather than player, so apparently female racers are out in this one! (How times have changed, they wouldn't get away with that nowadays! - ed) When playing against the computer you can be up against such characters as "Reg Wino" or "Phil Cretin".
The game itself offers primitive graphics, showing a zoomed-out, top-down view of the aquatic racing course, such that the sailboats actually constist of a trail of a few pixels moving across the screen. (saves having to draw an actual sailboat I guess!)
The player has some rudimentary control over the sailboat, via the keys A,Z,L,M. I find I can eventually sail to any desired position on the screen, but I've still not yet worked out the finer points of how the control system works, or if I'm still missing some vital key (again, I can't see any hint of the required keys within the game itself.)
Overall though, despite my minor quibbles, the game is actually OK. It looks like some effort went into it at least and it can be a little bit of fun to sail around the markers. Just one thing though, who on Earth is John Caig? (Amusingly, a Google search on the name will send you back to the WoS infoseek page on this game - could it be connected to the game author, J.C.Smith's initials?).
