It relives itself, over and over. She died in your arms, a gunshot wound to the chest. Angry? Yes. It’s time for a little payback. No! It’s time for a lot of payback! And you are going to do it with the tools you know best, guns and a car.

Interstate 82, an Activision release, is an unpretentious game. Yes, there are missions and a plot of sorts, but this game thrives on two things - dogfighting in vehicles and high-speed fun. This is not a game of road rage.

Sure the drivers are armed, but the vehicles are where the real power is. And we’re not talking your basic Wessel and Ripper (uh - maybe a play on Smith and Wesson) 52 caliber light machinegun mounted on the front of your car, nor the GunCo 42mm Homekeeper cannon. Nope, we’re talking radar-guided missiles, an L5000 industrial cutting laser, and some uplink which orders a satellite to fry your target.

Interstate 82 has a simple storyline: It’s 1982 and auto-terrorism is at an all-time high. Your name is Stampede (that’s your handle) and your longtime partner is missing. Your job, as a member of the AutoVigilantes Guild of America, is to track him down.

To do that, you’ll have to trek across country, encountering and defeating the bad road gangs (with such colorful names as Oklahoma Crude and the Creepers), and hopefully rescue Groove Champion.

Gameplay in Interstate 82 is quite good, actually. This game plays like Electronic Arts Need for Speed meets GT Interactive’s Duke Nukem. The pace is fast and furious, and the three game levels make for challenging competition.

The graphics are well-rendered, and the sound - while full of screeching tires and some eagle scream that has no rhyme or reason in the program - is quite good. The player interface is simple to master and can be adapted for keyboard, joystick (much easier to control) or mouse.

There is a drawback though in that this program is full of stereotypes. While zooming down a highway blowing up cars and running over bad guys who’ve been forced to exit their vehicles may not be politically correct, the stereotypes in this game would have been more at home in the early ’70s, not the early ’80s.

“That man Shaft is a bad ...” “Shut your mouth!” “Well, I’m talkin’ about Shaft ...” “Well he can dig it!”

Get the idea.

The main thrust of this program is, of course, to destroy the other guys en route to finding Groove. You are given clues, which take the form of missions you can’t alter in any way and are laid out quite well, and you have to trace his steps across a big game board. Complete the mission and you move on. Fail, and you must restart. The missions themselves are no-brainers. You move from point A to point B, using your map. But the enemy stands between you and your goal - whether it is driving through the street of Las Vegas, or across the desert.

When you destroy an enemy, you receive salvage dollars. These can be translated into improvements in your vehicle - more armor, custom repainting, better weapons, or engine work. The options package on this game is really good. There are 30 different vehicles, 24 weapons and components to make your vehicle a mean road machine, eight shielding and armor options (including an air freshener), and you can upgrade the car’s internal components.

Each mission is set up with a cutscene which, honestly, is just superfluous fluff. This is a shooter game, not much more than that. Activision has dressed it up with the tale of a missing comrade, but the object is to drive fast and destroy other cars and their drivers. But of course, Activision knew what it was doing - one look at the names and locations in this program ensures gamers that not even the parent company was treating this product as a serious excursion into the psyche of auto terrorism.

This is mindless fun.

The program is rated Teen for animated violence, strong language and suggestive themes. It supports multiplayer gaming over the Won.net Internet game zone or over a LAN line. There are four types of games that can be played online, including a silly one called ‘Hot Potato’ in which you get rid of a time bomb (obviously before it goes off) by colliding with other players.

Installation: 5. It’s your basic install.

Gameplay: 8. This program flows nicely from one scenario to the other, with little doubt about goals or missions.

Graphics: 7. For what is offered, it is well done.

Sound: 7. Solid, but too many silly stereotypes.

Concept: 7. It’s not road rage, but it’s not 1982 either. Actually, this game reads like a combination of several genres, which makes it not original. And it is a sequel, of sorts, to an earlier Interstate title.

Difficulty: 8. Three levels make the game exciting.

Value: 7. It is fun, simply because it is not a thinking game.

Overall: 7. Leave your mind by the door, sit down, relax and enjoy.