A Baby Ruth in the swimming pool of racing games.

Have you seen Caddyshack? Then you'll understand to what the title of this review refers. For those of you who haven't, read on.

This game is bad. Really really bad. I mean, with racing games, you should be using Gran Turismo as a yardstick and working from there. The design team behind GTC Africa seem to have used the 1980's Pole Position as their starting point.
This is a rallying game. You have a choice of licensed vehicles to rally in. Here's the first problem. Only one of them is actually a rally vehicle - the Subaru Impreza. Would you take a Pontiac Grand Am off road? If the designers have taken the time to license the cars, they could have at least licensed the advertising to go with them. Instead, you have 6 suck-mongous team colours to choose from, all of which are really bland. Rally cars just don't look right without sponsorship. So you'll end up racing in a two-tone Starsky-and-Hutch-esque Subaru.

Given that the cars are rally cars, you'd expect them work well off-road. However in GTCA, if you vary much from the centre of the track, your speed drops to a lowly 30mph. Here then, are rally cars that don't work off-road. However - get them on the road and they'll all touch 200mph and turn like they're on rails without so much of a hint of tyre breakaway.

The cars themselves seem okay, but the overall proportions appear to be off. The Subaru is too squat and the Pontiac Vibe is too tall. None of them gather dust, and like Gran Turismo, you can stuff them into a wall at 200mph and just bounce off. All the windows are mirrored - so no transparency to be seen anywhere. The cars behave like they're made of little fluffy clouds - they have no apparent weight to them. And you can't turn them over. On one course, there's a perfect looped-over cliff. If you drive up it, the car actually goes upside down, but as it falls back to the track, it mysteriously rights itself.

Perhaps the worst part of this game is the "God Syndrome" the programmers had when they were writing it. This is a problem with a lot of games where the programmers make the AI so ferocious that a game becomes unplayable. In the case of GTCA, you can be flat out at 200mph leading the pack, and at least two cars will pass you like you're standing still. Now I'm not a lousy gamer - I can race and win in most racing games. In Gran Turismo, I'm up on all gold medals. But in GTCA I have yet to finish first in a race.

The track design is bland and uninteresting. The special effects aren't very special and again, the total lack of advertising around the tracks makes them look very artificial. The tracks are loaded with "glass walls" - sections of terrain you can't see, but that steer you back on to the track should you get more than a micron off the centreline.

The race replays are awful. The cameras are so far away that the cars look like radio-control models (again, all shiny because they never acquire any dirt). There's no camera control either - you're stuck with the one pre-determined camera.

The core graphics of the game aren't too bad. Areas are recognisable as "city" and "desert" anc such, but there's just nothing there to make you go "hmmm". The car models are ultra shiny and as I mentioned above, all slightly wrong. The trees are obviously crossed polygons, the track surface has a very repeating texture and the background is kinda blurry at some points. The in-game sound is interesting. All the cars sound the same irrespective of what you're driving or which camera view you're using. The engines sound like a bumblebee operating a 1930s singer sewing machine. In-car, there's none of the satisfying sounds of gravel racking the underside like there are in other rallying games, or GT3, so you get the impression that the tracks are immaculately paved surfaces even though you can see dirt out of the window.

The game itself is riddled with bugs. It doesn't remember your player name, team choice or car choice between races, instead making you re-enter them all, every time. And the load times are excruciating. It takes a good 30 seconds to get to the title screen, and then 15 - 20 seconds per race to load.

This game is diabolical. The programmers should be ashamed to put their names to it in the light of shining stars like Gran Turismo. Thank God I only rented the game and didn't buy it.