Reviews

Vertical shoot'em up, in which you drive a bike, on suspendend platforms dodging the fatal holes, à la Bounder. it's a Spanish game: hence, a bit too hard.

Not the most original Spectrum game ever, and pretty taxing too, but well made and certainly not unfair to the player, Turbo Girl is a vertical shoot-em-up where you must drive a bike along a very dangerous path. Luckily you have got a projectile weapon which can help you in negotiating the obstacles you'll meet.

There are quite a few similar games available for the Spectrum, and Turbo Girl is a good one - although not quite one of the best.

The main thing that hits me about this videogame is the striking resemblance between TurboGirl herself and the female singer of Roxette .

Not bad vertical shooter. Mixture of SpyHunter and Bounder.

The main flaw of the game is that screen size of playing area is too small. This helps to maintain a good frame rate and reasonable speed.

Graphics are nice, having a very colourful background with smooth scroller.
Other features of the game are three big size final bosses, and a nice animated 'fall to pieces' floor effects in second stage, which are of nice quality and give variety to the game.

The game is hard, but every good arcade has to be. Anyway, you'll feel satisfaction when clear stages.. Just to discover that the game is too short =(
The game has many stuff for a 48k load, but designers would have gained if they divided every stage in three long substages and extended the learn-curve.

As sidenote. This was the first game to have a TV advert on Spain. It was a combo advert between the game itself and a new era of Micromania magazine ( from which was cover ).

Forgetting that you are on a bike is probably helpful in this game that is part space shooter, part platformer with a God view of the playing area and very little or no motorcycle riding sensation.
You need to shoot down enemies and jump over holes in the terrain across three scrolling levels.
Fortunately moments when jumping and firing are required simulaneously are very rare as the game is tricky enough without and space always feels cramped - a victim of quite large sprites and a small playing window.
Stage one blends a bit of shooting with a bit of jumping. Stage 2 is nearly all jumping and will require patience and pattern learning as most of the ground collapses into thin air. Stage 3 is all about steering and shooting, with the jump key redundant.
When I redefined my two fire keys to be next to each other (space and m) then I found progress easier.
There are 3 basic boss spacecraft to beat which will test your Space Phoenix/Galaxians/Centipede skills.
Everything in the game is above average, but too fussy for classic status.
As dandyboy so astutely notes, Turbo Girl herself is very like 80s singer Roxette. She is deployed gratuitously for a screen loader image, in stockings, suspenders and an open shoulder padded power jacket, astride her throbbing motor, nipples taut and ready for the adventure - those damn hotheaded coder Spaniards!
The graphics of the biker in the game make no attempt to convey gender which is probably why the British, immune to Roxette's pixel-porntastic charm, relreleased the same as the much less evocative Turbo Bike. But they were too lazy to change the game name once it had loaded.

1988 Dinamic Software (Spain)

An above average shooter, well written, very playable but missing something to make it worthwhile the time invested in it.
Maybe it's because it's similar to so many other games within the genre, also the graphics are uninteresting (where's the girl) and the predominant monochromatic background does not help either, although there's splashes of color here and there, and the framing is beautifully rendered and adds dept to the gaming area.
Fun for a few plays, more if you love this sort of action games.