OutRun Online Arcade Review

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The courses aren't so much a matter of negotiating their turns, none of which need to be taken at less then 250kph, as of threading your car through them and the fluctuating patterns of hell-bent traffic whilst losing as little speed as possible. Tipping your car into a drift is easy and predictable, but guiding it between cars and buses in gentle parabolas with fine adjustments of opposite lock, or timing its pendulous see-saw through S-bends, takes skill and a little bit of soul. It is a unique handling model, and an exquisite one still.

Eventually, you'll come to consider the lack of an unlock trail in OutRun Online Arcade a freedom or sorts. With nothing but leaderboards and the game's stiff Achievements or Trophies to worry about, you sink yourself deeper into its scoring system: hunting down quick, clean, close and stylish passes of rival Ferraris for big points payoffs, keeping a slipstream chain going through heavy traffic, living for the roar of the ridiculous dragon whose flypast celebrates the end of a well-driven stage.

The other single-player modes are Heart Attack and Time Attack. In the former, your girlfriend sets a series of variously surreal car-control challenges (don't crash, keep drifting, stay in marked sections of track, hit certain objects) and ranks your performance in them; a fine and funny companion piece that shifts the emphasis gently from raw speed onto finesse. Time Attack strips the traffic away for a ghost-car chase to the end, and although some will be obsessed with it, it's rather dry in truth. OutRun's tracks and handling never really lent themselves to this kind of rote learning.

Dino: the lover's choice.

With separate leaderboards for each of the five goals in each of the three modes (plus the 15-track continuous course), hunting down good results on all of them could easily become as great a long-term goal as Coast 2 Coast or Xbox OutRun 2 ever proposed. We only wish the implementation and integration of the online leaderboards was better; the focus on the local scoreboard after your race is one way in which OutRun Online Arcade really didn't need to be faithful to the arcade game, and going to hunt down your performance in the separate leaderboard section is a chore. Geometry Wars 2 is still the only game to recognise that the friends list is the local scoreboard of the 21st century; it's a shame its lessons haven't been learned here.

Another slight missed opportunity is the strictly casual multiplayer mode, offering only unranked matches for six players. It's a terrific cruise between friends - especially if you sacrifice fairness and turn on catch-up, with the option to turn collision off too for synchronised drifting displays. But it's never going to be a compelling network competition to rival that going on in the scoreboards.

512 BB: the right choice.

In truth, then, Sumo has fallen just a couple of minor steps short of optimising OutRun perfectly for its new network home. The online arcade of XBLA and PSN is a subtly different beast to the bricks-and-mortar-and-neon variety, and in leaderboards and multiplayer OutRun Online Arcade betrays signs of the closed-circuit thinking of the past.

But the truly remarkable thing? These are the only ways in which this essentially five-year-old game shows its age. Sure, the textures are grainy and the models are chunky if you look away from the dazzling, spinning Ferrrari centrepiece, if you stop and study them in the harsh light of 720p. But this is OutRun. Who's stopping?