If you’ve ever
saw Out Runners in the arcade when it was new you never would have
expected it to appear on the Mega Drive. The Sega Saturn, yes but the
Mega Drive, no way! It seems Sega thought otherwise. Out Runners on the
Mega Drive is to be fair, a very good attempt at bringing the arcade to
the home but I can’t understand why they just didn’t do a Saturn port.
You see, the problem with the Mega Drive version is that the system just
isn’t made for scaling loads of sprites. This is what makes Out Runners
so special. It was one of the last truly great sprite based racers.
So let’s focus on the Mega Drive’s strong points. Well, presentation is
well done bringing that arcade feel to the Mega Drive from the opening
right down to the music select. Graphics are also pretty good but here’s
the really dumb thing about Out Runners on the Mega Drive. It’s always
in split screen two player mode!!! Why??? I don’t want to see the CPU
player driving on his course. In fact I can’t watch him anyway because I
have to see where I’m going. And as you can guess, having a split screen
mode in a Mega Drive racer is really going to hit the CPU hard. This
results in a short draw distance that pretty much ruins the 3D effect
for me plus less road side objects making the updates from the distance
seem rather jerky. I can’t help but feel that if Sega had kept the split
screen mode for human vs human play only while giving a 1 player game a
full screen image, things would have looked so much better. After all,
the original Out Run on the Mega Drive has better 3D updates than this
game.
Overall, Out Runners on the Mega Drive isn’t a bad game. It looks good
in stills, sounds good and plays well. The only problem is that it’s
always stuck in split screen mode which in my opinion ruins the 1 player
gaming experience.
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