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July's game for the Together Retro game club at
http://www.racketboy.com was the Sega classic
Outrun which I revisited with glee.
Outrun is one of the games I remember always wasting a few quarters on back in the early 90's arcade at my local mall. It's a game of great simplicity -- drive a cool car as fast as you can, or lose. But even looking at the (dated?) game now, it's easy to see the appeal that it would have had on a pre-teen version of myself. Remember, the arcade version put you literally behind the wheel of a Ferrari and let you gun it toward the beach with a blonde in the passenger's seat. Any avid follower of
Saved By The Bell and its ilk would have been drawn in.
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The GBA port of
Outrun is excellent in my humble opinion. It has a very 16-bit feel to it that holds up quite well to how my brain remembers the arcade original. The music, which you cannot forget to mention while discussing
Outrun is just as great as ever. In fact, I'm now on the hunt for the soundtrack recording by the SST Band, as
Outrun is often mentioned in discussions of best-soundtracks-of-all time. And rightly so. The GBA controls are responsive and satisfactory as far as I'm concerned.
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Speaking of which, when I first started playing the game this past month I decided I would do so using a GameCube racing wheel in an attempt to recapture the feel of the arcade. The wheel I chose was this one, made by Intec. It's a nice smaller sized wheel that doesn't take up a ton of space if you don't have a huge game room. It features lots of buttons on both the left and right side, making it ideal for both lefties and righties -- or for switching between control schemes on the fly while making some crazy turns. Also, its built in suction cups cause it to firmly plant itself on my Ikea desk and integrate itself quite seamlessly with my Game Boy Player set up.
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Unfortunately as fun as bringing the arcade home was, it turns out that I just could not beat the damn game with the wheel. So eventually I resorted back to my trusty Hori pad. The thing about
Outrun is that it's not a terribly long game by any means. I beat it at least three or four times throughout the month in fact (see high-score picture below right for proof!). But what's nice is the choose-your-own-route dynamic of the courses. When you get to the old Robert Frost-style forks, you decide which way to go. I didn't end up beating every combination of courses myself, as I really couldn't keep track of which ones I had done.
[img width=300 height=200]http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2003/gba/segagallery/0604/sega_screen012.jpg[/img] [img width=200 height=300]http://imgur.com/YEh85.jpg[/img]
I'm not sure if a score of 25359300 is actually any good, but it was my (recorded) high score of the month. I can't say I really even mastered the game as the truth is I never even figured out when it would be advantageous to hit the brake. Really my only strategy was to put it in high gear as often as I could take it, and to just ease off the gas whenever I had to take a sharp turn or make a daring pass. Somehow this worked out for me. At any rate, I can definitely say I had a lot of fun with this game, and it's certainly one of my favorite arcade racers of all time.
