Super Hang-On (Mega Drive) (PAL) - Arcade Mode Full Playthrough

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Yep, you guessed it, another game from my childhood. Super Hang-On, sequel to the successful Hang-On and brainchild of the legendary Yu Suzuki, was released in arcades in 1987 and later ported to the Mega Drive in 1989. My first exposure to it was via the Mega Games I compilation released in 1992, which was one of the only three cartridges my family had for our Mega Drive at the time, meaning this might just be one of the first games I've ever played.

The Mega Drive version has two different game modes: Arcade and Original. Arcade Mode is the one you see here, where you can choose between one of four courses and your goal is to make it to the checkpoint before time runs out. Simple stuff.

Original Mode, meanwhile, has you race time trials against a series of rivals and use the prize money you earn in order to repair/upgrade your bike. I'm considering making a video series on that sometime, but each lap of a race corresponds to two consecutive stages from one of the Arcade Mode tracks, and any given race can have between two and six laps, which you will then have to repeat a minimum of five times. Needless to say, I'd be very hard-pressed to make it even remotely interesting for the average viewer.

Speaking of recording, though, you have no idea how much of a Sisyphean task it was to get this video realized. I actually had the idea pretty much ever since I got my hands on a capture card, since I wanted to record my runs on original hardware (Fusion has worse sound and also no slowdown when the road slopes, so it was kind of out of the question). That didn't work so well, though, since my recordings all ended up suffering from the most esoteric issues imaginable, like regular audio dropouts, or the mother of all video/audio desyncs.

Even recording it with BlastEm, like I ended up doing here, wasn't without its difficulties due to various visual glitches from imperfect emulation that I did my best trying to edit out. I'm hoping I got them all, but if I didn't, I'm going to cry, curl up into a fetal position on the ground, and then maybe reupload this video with the stragglers edited out.

0:00 - Opening
0:25 - Africa
5:51 - Africa Ending
7:07 - Asia
17:01 - Asia Ending
18:16 - America
31:43 - America Ending
32:57 - Europe
50:17 - Europe Ending