2128: Point to Point

I’m apparently on a minor retro kick at the moment, what with playing The Legend of Zelda and, also, downloading the “3D Classics” version of OutRun on my 3DS.

I love OutRun. It’s one of those games that I used to see in the arcade but, for whatever reason, didn’t play very often. (I feel it was probably something to do with my Dad baulking at the idea of paying 50p for one credit, but I usually managed to convince him that it was worth paying this much to play G-LOC, which at least had aeroplanes in it.) We also had the dreadful Atari ST port of Turbo OutRun, which I actually rather enjoyed despite its atrocious framerate, appalling load times (in the middle of a race!) and loss of various animations and game features if you had less than 1MB of RAM in your computer.

Despite all these setbacks, OutRun has always remained a racing game that I’ve been very fond of, and when the Shenmue series hit Dreamcast with a variety of playable Sega games right there within the game itself, I spent a great deal of time recapturing past glories (or, more commonly, indignities) on OutRun and Super Hang-On. When the PlayStation 2/Xbox era rolled around, I spent a lot of time playing the wonderful OutRun 2, which brought the basic gameplay of the original up to date with fresh graphics, but otherwise played just like an old arcade game. And when the Xbox 360 got a tweaked port of OutRun 2 on its downloadable Xbox Live Arcade service, well, of course I was going to play it again.

3D Classics OutRun is arguably a step back technology-wise from OutRun 2 and its spinoffs; it’s based on the original 16-bit sprite-based graphics rather than being rendered in full polygonal glory. This is true to the original game, however, and there are a few little tweaks here and there to bring it a bit more up to date. It runs at 60 frames per second, for one thing, making it look smoother than the arcade version ever did, and makes excellent use of the 3DS’ glasses-free stereoscopic 3D for some impressive visual effects. Possibly my favourite “pointless but cool” feature in it, however, is the simulation of the arcade cabinets’ movement that you can turn on; OutRun was one of the many arcade games in the period that had “Deluxe” cabinets featuring hydraulics that would cause your seat to move around as you played. Your field of vision on the tiny screen of the 3DS isn’t quite the same as literally feeling your car being slammed around corners, but it’s a decent enough approximation, and a fun (and optional) effect to play with.

But enough about the technical side of things; every time I play some variation on OutRun I find myself pining for this lost age of racing games. Not necessarily because of the graphics or the style of play or anything — playing racing games with strict countdown time limits can be a bit of a culture shock these days! — but because they feature a subtle difference from most modern racing games in that they are point-to-point racers rather than lap-based.

I like point-to-point races, and we don’t see nearly enough of them in modern racing games. There are exceptions, mind you: Burnout 2 had a nice little feature where once you completed the various events in one area, you then had a point-to-point race to get to the next one; Burnout Paradise was almost entirely point-to-point races; the Midnight Club series took an enjoyably chaotic approach to point-to-point racing by allowing you to choose your own route through an open-world city, so long as you hit the checkpoints along the way. But despite these examples, many of the racers we have today are lap-based.

Why is this something I care about? Well, lap-based racers are fun, of course, and allow you to learn the course, even within a single race. Point-to-point racers, meanwhile, have a wonderful sense of going on a journey, and in the case of games like OutRun, it’s immensely satisfying to successfully reach the next stage of said journey and see what new scenery there is to admire a little further down the road. OutRun even takes this one step further, by providing a fork in the road at the end of each stage, allowing you to continue in one of two different directions to create your own custom route through the game.

3D Classics OutRun isn’t a deep game in the slightest, especially when held up against more modern examples. But there’s a purity to the experience that you just don’t get in more realistic fare; it’s a game that revels in the enjoyment of taking a fast car on a rollercoaster ride and seeing how far you can get this time. I love it, and I’m happy it’s still a relevant game in 2015!