The original Ultimate Race from Kalisto was a fantastic-looking arcade racing game that unfortunately few gamers got the opportunity to see. After all, the game was only available with OEM bundles of PowerVR accelerators. Now, MicroProse has teamed up with Kalisto to bring a bigger, better Ultimate Race Pro to the masses. The result is a top-tier racing game with spectacular visuals, solid gameplay, and a surprisingly good multiplayer mode. It's not perfect by any stretch, but it is a lot of fun.
Ultimate Race Pro offers the standard variety of racing gameplay options. You can play alone, against the computer, or against other players via modem, null-modem, IPX LAN, and Internet links. Ultimate Race Pro will also be available on MPlayer someday, but like most new games boasting online service support, this one hit the streets before the online service was ready to support it. This is too bad, because until the Mplayer support comes online, finding and joining a game on the Internet means going to Kalisto's Ultimate Race site and using a very shaky Java chat applet. I ran into numerous delays while trying to connect to games in this way and occasionally had trouble simply connecting to the chat server.
