There’s an option to rewind after a nasty crash a la Forza Motorsport, an unwelcome concession to modernity that breaks the spirit of the game and is better left unused. Daytona USA for the Sega Saturn was forty pounds after you’d spent four hundred on the console itself, and it was crap.Įxtras are kept mostly separate from the arcade game. It’s a stark reminder of how the value proposition of games has changed. It’s funny to think that if you play each track three times, you’ve saved money over playing the arcade original. You can tell it’s an arcade game as the timer counts down relentlessly between checkpoints, designed to milk every last scrap of currency from your wallet in days gone by. Your opponents are uncaring bricks with all the intelligence of the cars from Frogger, unwavering from their predestined route. Mistakes are punished with a crippling loss of speed as rivals race by. DAYTONA USA GAME OVER MANUALYour car gains a top speed boost if you choose manual transmission, which encourages dedication to the craft. This is a game of physical absolutes: precision power-slides are initiated by slamming onto the brakes, with careful glances at the speedometer to maintain optimum velocity. You can play them in reverse if your lust for variation knows no bounds, but the fun is in mastering each course and shaving precious milliseconds off your fastest laps. There are only three tracks, because three is all you need. Seaside Street Galaxy is the quintessential massive bastard of a course, twice as long as the others with more nasty turns than I’ve got sarcastic metaphors. Dinosaur Canyon blasts through a tunnel and plummets at breakneck pace into a lush valley. There’s Three Seven Speedway, with Sonic the Hedgehog carved into the side of a more literal Mount Rushmore. This is the spiritual grandfather of Burnout and Need for Speed, with a hearty chunkiness that warms the heart like vegetable soup on a winter’s day.ĭaytona is the distillate of what made Sega arcade games so enticing: blue skies as far as the eye could see, perfectly designed tracks that blend authenticity with fantasy. It’s hard to believe this game was made in 1993: while the cars have moving textures painted on the wheels and a trip to the pit lane will make you think the car is being attacked by cardboard boxes, it’s still blisteringly fast and fun. DAYTONA USA GAME OVER PORTABLEOnly with a giant high-definition screen and thumping surround sound can you truly appreciate the high-octane thrills of the arcade, impossible to replicate on a 15″ portable CRT. Not a single colour has been watered down every pixel is in place. The Dreamcast remake Daytona USA 2001 stalled on the starting grid, with rubbish steering and dull speedways. It was a sluggish mess corrected in the subsequent Daytona CCE, which added some great new courses but broke the authentic handling of the original conversion and remixed the soundtrack to a blasphemous extent. Daytona was a release game for the Saturn and suffered from a rushed development cycle: scenery popped out of nowhere like you were riding a ghost train, stuttering along an unlubricated rail. A brief history lesson if you’ll indulge me: the poor old Sega Saturn just wasn’t up to the task of a decent Daytona conversion. What’s most enticing about this release is its purity, because this is the Daytona our homes have always deserved but never received. It was an extravagant racer often copied (especially by Sega themselves) but arguably never bettered for sheer exhilarating fun. “DAYTONAAAAA! Let’s go away!” belting out over cheesy J-Rock. Primary colours piercing the cigarette smoke of the arcade like alien floodlights from a world without brown and grey. There was no game more enticing than the legendary Daytona USA. DAYTONA USA GAME OVER FREEI loved going there when I was young: hobby horses, bumper cars and a worryingly rickety roller coaster were the highlight of my childhood summers. Those were the days when ice cream was free if you nagged your parents enough: when people asked me what foot I kicked with, I thought it was a genuine enquiry into pedal dexterity and not thinly-veiled sectarianism.Īs a fledgling gamer I was drawn to the noise-belching razzmatazz of arcade games: their hydraulic cabinets that dwarfed my tiny hands, the unstoppable gravitational pull of pound coins from my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles bumbag and into the coin slot. In Portrush, a dilapidated town on the north coast of Ireland, there’s an amusement centre called Barry’s.
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