Turbo OutRun Longplay (Arcade) [60 FPS]

Developed and published by Sega in 1989.

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Having taken the arcades by storm with the original OutRun back in 1986, it made good commercial sense to capitalise on it's success by developing a sequel. Sure enough, Sega unveiled the successor to OutRun in 1989, calling it Turbo OutRun.

The core game remains very similar to the original game. You're still driving across America in a Ferrari in a point-to-point race against the clock through heavy traffic with a hot, blonde, female passenger at your side. The one main difference this time is that you're now competing head-to-head with another racer.

Your adversary is a moustachioed beach-bum driving what appears to be a Porsche and is clearly vying for the attention of your female passenger. Whoever completes the next leg of the race first will have the honour of her company for the next stage; fail to be first and she will drop you like a hot potato and hitch a ride with your rival, leaving you to complete the next section solo.

One of the new features added in this game is the addition of the turbo mode. As if your car wasn't already fast enough, you can activate the turbo for a several seconds of additional, tarmac-scorching speed. Activating the turbo will cause your engine to build up heat (shown by the heat bar at the bottom of the display) and continued use of the turbo will cause your car to overheat, temporarily preventing use of the turbo until it cools down. Although the turbo is great for powering along the straights, it's suicide to try and take corners whilst it's active as you'll simply slide right off the track and end up crashing; the best players will know when to activate the turbo for the best effect.

After each stage of the race, you'll be given the opportunity to upgrade an aspect of your car. Upgrades include better handling, a more powerful engine and improved turbo. You can only pick one upgrade at a time, but it stays permanently fitted to the car; my advice is to pick the upgraded tyres as soon as possible to make cornering easier.

Despite these additions to the gameplay, I can't help but wonder whether Sega was suffering from DSAS (difficult second album syndrome). Rather than improving on the original (which would have been a very difficult task considering just how damn good the original was), it feels worse than the original game in every conceivable way.

The biggest problem here is the positioning of the player's car sprite on the screen. It's considerably higher than the original game (presumably to fit the overheat bar at the bottom), so the result is that there is very little distance between the car and vanishing point, which gives you very little time to react to corners or oncoming traffic. The player car sprite is quite large, so the problem is made worse by the fact that what part of the road remains is filled up with your own car!

Perhaps to combat this issue, the developers changed collisions with other cars so that there's less of a speed decrease and less of a loss in handling. While it's a welcome change, it makes the game feel more like a Demolition Derby than a racing game.

More screen space is lost to the horrid speedometer dials in the bottom left of the screen. Not only to they look terrible, but actually make it harder to work out what your speed is when compared to the simple, digital read-out from the original game.

The branching course paths from the original game have been removed and a single, linear set of stages introduced instead, drastically reducing replay value. The designers of the original game cleverly designed stage changes so that the change occurred whilst you were driving round a corner; the sky colours change gradually and the background landscape actually glides into view as you turn the corner. Turbo OutRun doesn't even attempt to handle the transition gracefully; you cross the checkpoint and the background graphic and clouds simply change.

It feels as though Sega were trying to emphasise the sense of speed in this game as much as possible and the end result is a game that is simply less controllable and less enjoyable to play.

The music from the original game was brilliant and one of the most memorable soundtracks of all time. The music in this game is average at best and not particularly memorable. The cars engine sound is rather whiny and overshadows the rest of the audio, mainly because you spend so much more time braking/crashing/accelerating than the original.

I suppose that, had the original OutRun never existed, this would have been considered to be a much more impressive game. As it is, it's attempts to step out from the shadow of it's predecessor by being bigger, bolder and brasher, but the end result is a poorer gaming experience.

At the end of the day, Turbo OutRun isn't a terrible game, but neither is it the sequel that the original game deserved.
#retrogaming