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Sega Confirms OutRun 2 For Arcades
Thanks to several readers for pointing out that Sega AM2 have opened an official page for their forthcoming arcade driving game, OutRun 2. This sequel to the all-time classic racer, originally released way back in 1986, was unveiled at Sega's private show in Tokyo last night, and confirms earlier information that it would run on the Chihiro arcade hardware, a modified Xbox arcade board, making it a prime candidate for conversion to Microsoft's console. The game also sports licensed Ferrari cars (the F50, F250, and Testarossa), and apparently, driving 'cool' will impress the girl in the passenger seat and get you different game endings.
Hopefully this will start a very long chain of arcade titles being ported over to the Xbox quickly, and well. The concept is good- make a console with good hardware, use it in arcades, port the same game over to the home version of the console. (Profit?!?)
The Xbox is not going to beat the Playstation 2 because of the huge difference in numbers- but hopefully the fact that it is easier to program for, and port to/from will benefit us Xbox users.
I've played a few PC games that were ported from the Xbox, and they were excellent games - Rallisport Challenge comes to mind- good on the Xbox, excellent on the PC. The PC gets much better graphics, but the gameplay is the same.
Maybe it will be a winning combination. Personally I am sick and tired of hardware and software conflicts while playing games on my PC, so I finally bought an Xbox. It thrills me to play for 2 hours without a single crash. Most of the crashes on the PC come from audio/video driver incompatibilites. I've sunk so much money into video cards in the past 2 years, I could have bought an Xbox and dozens of games.
Finally- freedom from that mess, AND Sega will hopefully be porting over arcade games...cool.
No reason to lie.
Graphics was astounding at the time.
My friends were even more impressed than me, because that game let you dream to be "on the road" with a fabulous blonde near you (at the time I didn't care of this detail, but they were AT LEAST 2 years older than me... mind you that at the time I was at a seaside summer camp, when I was older I started to care of that detail as well :D).
Outrun 1's music was awesome as well...
Now, to get ontopic: When this beast comes to the XBox, I really wonder how they will compress the landscape appearance of all the 15 levels to fit the XBox Ram, or if they will make things to be loaded on the fly like "SWIV" for the Amiga (so that you will have to load only 3 levels at a time, current level + the two other levels).
The landscape anyway seems to be a bit simplistic, maybe is Sega's choice of screenshots, but only this image shows a complex building on the roadside. This is fully in spirit with the original game... I only hope to see some parts with many of the wacky fake advertisement billboards that used to be there in Outrun, Turbo Outrun and the fabulous Super Hang-On.
This Outrun does not stand out for graphics (if you want to see one of the best graphics look this game here), but I really really hope that it will stand out again for the "Cool" factor. Outrun was cool as a snowball that did not melt in hell at the time (the second game that made that effect was Bubble Bobble).
Hope to see it soon in an amusement arcade here :) (or a good XBox conversion as well).
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