OutRun Online Arcade

OutRun Online Arcade

There are few moments in gaming quite so exhilarating as speeding around a clifftop hairpin in a gleaming red Ferrari, Sega blue skies stretching off for miles around, while a blonde girl in the passenger seat punches the air in glee. It’s a schoolboy sort of fantasy, for sure, but OutRun has always been the best driving game at delivering it, be it in the arcades with a jealous crowd looking on or at home on a console over Xbox LIVE.

OutRun Online Arcade is, in a great many ways, more of the same. Based on Outrun 2, the polished follow-up to the seminal 1980s arcade racer, it delivers much of the same experience that Xbox owners drove back in 2003. However, for this title there are two key distinctions. Firstly, the game is based on the OutRun 2 SP arcade cabinet, the latest iteration of the arcade game with its new American-themed courses and tactics-encouraging slipstreaming technique. Secondly, and most importantly, it’s available as a downloadable only, for the astonishingly reasonable price of 800 MSP (£6.80).

Partly for that reason and partly because of its arcade heritage, there’s a sense that this is a slight game when you first open it up. Everything is unlocked right from the off, from the game’s ten licensed Ferraris (the F50, Enzo, 360 Spider, F40, Testarossa, 288 GTO, 512 BB, Dino 246 GTS, 365 GTS/4 Daytona, and 250 GTO) to its various streamlined modes. Gone is the difficulty distinction between cars, speed and handling of each having been leveled out to provide a fair fight no matter which one you plump for, and this even playing field could be taken as over-simplicity.

But that’s to miss the game’s true purpose, which has always been about plotting a high-speed route through bold, bright vistas, drifting around corners with style and grace and revelling in the joy that comes from registering a time that just pips your friends at the post. OutRun Mode provides a straight race from start to finish, racing against checkpoint time limits, the aim always on threading your car along the winding roads as quickly and as elegantly as possible. Heart Attack has your girlfriend passenger setting you a series of car control challenges before ranking your performance while Time Attack, the final single player mode removes the traffic (save for your ghost car) placing full emphasis on speed and efficiency.

The game’s leaderboards are well integrated, providing ongoing challenges across a wide variety of criteria. The only slight disappointment to Sumo’s conversion is the lacklustre multiplayer mode, which offers only unranked races for up to six players. With catch-up turned on it can be a great deal of fun, but for serious competition, hardcore racers need to look elsewhere.

That said, OutRun was never a game built for hardcore racers in that realism-seeking Gran Turismo/Forza sense. Rather, it's a videogame version of a theme park ride, a glorious, top-down streak through a cartoon countryside, bursting at the seams with joyful exuberance. On those terms, OutRun Online Arcade offers exactly what it always promised, and for a price that nobody could sneer at.

4 out of 5