Slip Stream Longplay (Arcade) [QHD]

Developed and published by Capcom in 1995
Follow me on Twitter @   / al82_retro  

While Capcom had quite the pedigree when it came to side-scrolling platform and brawler games, I think this is the only 3D-style arcade racing game the studio ever put out. It's a sprite-scaling affair that the likes of Taito and Sega had been putting out close to a decade earlier, and true 3D racers like Daytona USA and Sega Rally had made the pseudo-3D sprite-scalers of years gone by seem pretty archaic by the time this came along in 1995.

The game was released in, from what I can tell, to a very limited market that included Brazil and Latin America only, which explains why the only ROM sets in the MAME database are for Brazil and Hispanic editions of the game.

What makes Slip Stream even more interesting is the fact the game is powered by Sega's System 32 arcade board, rather than Capcom's own CPS1 or CPS2 hardware. Why Capcom chose to partner with Sega on this is something of a mystery; it's possible the System 32 hardware was more suited to the sprite scaling trickery required to make a decent sprite-based racer, rather than anything Capcom had available.

As for the game itself, it's a fairly average F1 racing game whose principal feature is the inclusion of a slipstreaming mechanic; tailgate an opponent's race car until the your speed gauge begins flashing, then pull out from behind them to active a short turbo to power to the front of the pack.

The game seems to use an internal resolution of 416 x 224 for the main menu, but switches to 320 x 224 for the actual races, which made normal means of capturing footage more problematic than usual. Pixel perfect mode is pretty much out, unless you want large black bars throughout the video, so capturing at 4:3 aspect ration was the only way to go here.

#capcom
#retrogaming
#F1