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Outrun 2 Review - Xbox

The original "Outrun" game was quite a classic back in the day, where many of Sega's arcade games defined the 1980's, and ports to home systems were ones eagerly awaited. First appearing in arcades in 1986, Outrun took the basic Pole Position concept, and made it much more fun, with beach-side racing, power-sliding and more than just bland chicanes to tackle.

Ports later appeared on Sega Mastersystem, Sega Megadrive, Saturn, and even Dreamcast, before Sega's ungraceful fall and pull back from hardware. Outrun 2 recently appeared in the arcades, sporting a gorgeous 3D environment, and taking many throw backs to the original. Outrun 2 was programmed on the Chihiro hardware, which is essentially a slightly up-specced Xbox, so it's not surprising to see the game now appearing on Xbox.

Buoyed by the success of some of its other ports to Xbox and Playstation 2, Sega attempts the same with the updated arcade racer, Outrun 2.

Gameplay

Drawing mainly from its arcade cabinet roots, Outrun 2 is a pure arcade racer, with very fast paced action, but also very little differentiating the different vehicles, tracks, or physics of the road. If you crash, mysteriously you always seem to land exactly the right way on the road, with only a speed penalty as punishment.

Sega continues the original Ferrari license, and you are able to select such exotic vehicles such as the 360 Spider, Dino 246GTS, 365 Daytona, and F50 right from the start, with a few cars locked to give you something to aim towards. Unfortunately, Outrun 2 being the simple game that it is, pretty much all of them handle in a very arcade and simplistic fashion with a simple "acceleration", "handling", and "max speed" bar to distinguish them. If you're really keen, you may also elect to choose from manual or auto mode. Many would be yearning that the valuable license was put to use in actually simulating the vehicles, rather than just their presence.

Outrun 2 is split into three main modes - "Outrun Arcade" mode, "Outrun Challenge", and Xbox live mode. Each of these contains a number of sub-modes to extend the game as it appeared in arcades.

"Outrun Arcade" as it indicates, is really just a straight port of the arcade machine, a pure speed arcade racer, where your aim is to reach each checkpoint in time, whilst avoiding other traffic on the road and reaching the finish line. Sound similar to games you played 15 years ago? Unfortunately this is not far from the truth.

Its saving grace is its not entirely linear, giving several different paths through the track, leading to different sections, and ultimately several unique endings. But for the most part, you're just gripping that accelerator button and jiggling the thumb stick a little to avoid the other traffic. Not too exciting.

Further to the pure Arcade mode, is the "Heart Attack (continued next page)