Reviews// Outrun 2

I don't own an Xbox - so this will have to wait until hell goes cold or Outrun2 is released on another platform (PC being the most easiest with its xbox history, yes?)

What I want to know is - how does Outrun 2 compaire to the drift based racing of Burnout 3?? I'm very happy with Burnout 3 and cannot imagine a better drift racing game for a long time.

ps - thanks for the name dropping in the GTA preview :)

Compared to Burnout 3, Outrun2 doesn't even come close, Choi, especially in terms of the 'drift' element, upon which Outrun places so much emphasis.

I made the mistake of buying Outrun a couple of weeks after Burnout and, in comparrison, it's a pretty weak and lacklustre affair. It works great for a quick bash on the arcade, as the gameplay is almost identical to the fantastic Scud Race - but that is an early Model 3, therefore pretty damn old now, and certainly not on par with what we've come to expect these days.

And the remix of Magical Sound Shower is s**t...

I think Burnout 3 is possibly the better game, or at least as good as... but with specific regards to drift based racing, Outrun 2 wins hands down. Alot of the drifting in Burnout 3 is just over-embellished skidding. As far as I'm concerned, Outrun 2 absolutely defines game drifting as it should be...

I was a massive fan on the original two Burnouts, but the treatment the new EA-published leaves me a little cold - I don't like the way it trys to pander to some perceived demographic, with angsty teenage grunge-ska-pop and the rather patronising 'Grrr-rrreat Rubbin'' buzzword barrage. Turning off the appalling soundtrack and the ludicrous DJ Stryker is necessary to stop me boiling with rage. As for the gameplay, it's very fast (good fps!) and big and colourful and fun but there's no real incentive to stay on the track - clipping walls or driving off road don't slow you down very much and as long as you keep taking cars out you can compensate for bad driving with boost. It does feel a bit like Mario Kart I always think. The whole EA thing has kind of lost something of the old Burnout experience - what I liked about the first two was that they were loads of fun to play, and had a sort of 'bedroom industry' homemade feel. They, especially the first one, required more precision too.

Outrun's the purist's choice in every way - music by famous games music writer Richard Jacques, not trendy bands, and that beautifully balanced, well-engineered Sega gameplay that's so subtle that it seems to pass people by altogether these days. It's packed with ferraris and drifting to boot, definitely too of my favourite things. When you play Outrun 2, you get this flattering feeling that it knows what you want to do, and lets you do it, not to say that it doesn't demand all your concentration too. A difficult feeling to describe, but I used to feel it a lot more in games than I do now, recently only the very best SEGA and Treasure titles have engendered it, and PES of course.

It's really about what you want from a game - Outrun 2 will occupy a similar place in my gaming diet that Crazy Taxi has managed to for so long: the perfect way to waste ten or fifteen minutes.

Certainly, the quality of the conversion is very high. Also, there's something about it that attracts people, regardless of genre preference. At Gamestars Live I dragged the group I was with over to the Outrun 2 pods at the back of Microsoft's little Xbox colony. By the time we'd finished, there were four total converts, the rest simply not being Xbox owners.

If you've always loved the way Sega does things, you'll love this - it will remind you of exactly why you love that ethos, and you'll remember just how much Sega has done for the racing game over the years.

Credit to AM2 for retaining everything that made the original so special, and to Sumo Digital for making it more than just a simple port.

Have you ever driven a car? A real one, made of metal, with wheels, needs a licence.

Skidding is the loss of traction between the wheels of a car and the road caused when the retardent force at the brake discs exceeds the traction between the road and the tyres. The effect of skidding is to reduce directional control under heavy braking.

No matter how hard you brake in Burnout, you cannot initiate a "skid".

Drift is actually a directional control technique, dialled in through throttle and brake control, which produce weight distribution changes and provoke rear wheel (and in extreme conditions four wheel) traction loss.

The "over-embellished skidding" in Burnout can be controlled by careful application of throttle and brake, and so bears more resemblence to actual car dynamics than the *actually* sideways progress you can make in Outrun 2.

If anything, it's the "drifting" in Outrun which deserves our derision - owing as it does, more to a none-newtonian physics model than the one generally at play in our universe.

Yeah.

Gonna have to get contentious with this one : )


Yes. A small crap hatchback through traffic jams. As a respectful road user I have never skidded nor drifted. Although I've done some accidental vehicular ice skating before.



Doesn't that make a drift a controlled rear wheel skid? Cos if that's the general jist, then I made a fair point. You don't always feel in control of Burnout 3 drifts, which makes them, IMO, little more than over-embellished skids.



Well perhaps, but bearing in mind how exaggerated the rest of Burnout 3 is, making the drifting reflect real life physics seems a bit weak. It only ever feels like a drift when you're 'boosting', and that's not what real cars do - at least not like that...



Outrun 2!? derision!?[shocked] But that's what makes it so much fun. Every time I attempted to get a drift going in 'proper' car games, like Gran T 3, I just spin out of control immediately and it makes me want to cry.

I maintain that Outrun 2 has got the video game drift spot-on. It's not realistic, but that's why it's so good. Just like platform games should feature characters that can jump at least twice their own height, and FPS games should involve characters that can take several bullets to the head without flinching.

Then I will refrain, merely out of politeness, from suggesting that you do not have the experience to comment knowledgeably on this one.



No. During a skid, wheels do not display rotational motion - they "lock up". During drift, wheels spin almost as normal, but lateral motion occurs simultaneously.



Ah, if what you are trying to say here is "I'm crap at Burnout" then I misunderstood you, and I apologise. But I (and I know Config and Tyrion) pretty much can control any drift in Burnout.

If however, you mean that you occasionally run into oncoming traffic while drifting... that is just a fact of life. Check any Tokyo scrap-yard on a Monday morning for proof.



I didn't mean, nor suggest, that it was "realistic" just that it followed the general laws of Newtonian physics, which Outrun just... doesn't. So Outrun is nothing like drifting isn a real car, Burnout is - to an extent.



Yes. Derision.

Now hang on there, this is getting a bit silly. Both games have pretty cartoonish drifting styles I would say, and in both games drifting can be induced far more easier than you ever could in real life. Burnout drifting is fun if you're boosting, but otherwise it's just not that exciting. Outrun does take one step further away from reality in that ridiculously exaggerated drifting in fact makes your car go faster. But arguing which owes more to real physics is missing the point - if you want a game in which you actually have to do the same things as you would in real life to drift, you have to look a lot further, say at PC sim-type titles. Live For Speed is good 'un, or the slightly older Real Car Simulator (Nissan edition of course :D).

That said, having experience of no small amount of drifting myself (mostly, but not all, from the passenger seat!) I must say that the best thing about drifting is not how it is done, but how it makes you feel: pretty much like the most spectacularly radical human that ever lived. And of the two games being discussed, it is Outun2 that delivers this feeling best. It's like drifting in your dreams. Yesterday I was playing it in the office and pulled quite a crowd, despite it being my first go on the console version and the fact that I was being quite pedestrian by Outrun standards. The fact that you have more control over the drift than in Burnout (where once drifting you have a lot less control over the line the car takes) also means that it is possible to weave, while drifting, through the traffic. Which is brill.

'Tis true. And in reality I was only taking exception at the description of drifting as "over-embellished skidding".


Now get an avatar.