The sun blazes down out of a perfect blue sky. Palm trees line the road ahead. The blonde in the passenger seat of your bright red Ferrari waves her arms in the air as you power slide at 278 kmp/h round a massive bend on the beachfront. You casually hang your elbow out of the open window, squeezing between two Sunday drivers and narrowly missing a big yellow school bus. ‘Whooow,’ she screams, ‘How far are you going to take me” All the way, baby. All the way.
Welcome to OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast. Pure fun from the moment you pick it up. Fifteen fully licensed Ferraris and all the tracks from 2003’s OutRun 2 and OutRun 2 SP, the arcade version released a year later. You’ve got all the controls worked out by the time you clear the first corner. By the first checkpoint you’ve mastered drifting round corners to maintain speed – tap the brake to flip out the back end then bang on the power as streams of smoke billow from your rear tyres.
‘OutRun‘ is the classic arcade game: you, your girl and a Ferrari. Race against the clock through your pick of 15 branched stages, all the time slipping through detailed scenery and gorgeous skies. Before each checkpoint, the road forks: turn left and you stick to the easy stages, turn right and they get progressively harder.
In ‘Time Attack’, you race empty streets against a ghost car – race through sequential stages or one stage over and over again. Or there’s ‘Heart Attack’ where your ability to drift, pass cars, or not crash is graded by your demanding girlfriend ‘ though surely you’re playing this to get away from all that’
‘Coast 2 Coast’, the central play mode, simply combines everything else. You are set increasingly difficult challenges ‘ from simply beating your rivals to impressing your girlfriend with your ability to use an expensive supercar to dribble a giant beach ball ‘ and are graded on your performance. Get grade ‘A’s and progress. Simple.
Overtaking cars, drifting round corners, slipstreaming opponents, and sticking to the racing line wins you OutRun Miles to unlock cars, music and courses in the Showroom. And every mile counts, whether you win, lose or spend the whole time bouncing off crash barriers.
The graphics might not be mind-blowing, but this is certainly the best OutRun has ever looked. The menus are elegantly designed and easy to navigate and the game itself is full of beautiful touches: the grass flying as you run off the road, headlights switching on at night, cars indicating to change lanes, the rows of traffic cones going ‘pop, pop, pop’ as they spin off your bonnet, and in the transition between each stage, something always flies overhead – geese, seagulls, hot air balloons, zeppelins, planes, and more – depending on how well you’ve driven.
Of course it’s all totally unrealistic – smash sideways into a concrete barrier at 200 kmp/h and it will just ping you back across the road with only a small loss of speed. At worst you might spin round a few times or even flip end over end, but you’ll always land on your wheels totally undamaged and facing the right way. But OutRun is not about authentic car mechanics. It’s about one very simple idea: screaming sideways round a corner in a stupidly fast car.
