OutRun

This game really spoke to me. As someone who has gone on a three-day road trip across the country, I was immediately hooked by OutRun's breezy theme and addictive music.

I find a lot of racing games from this era to be fussy in the controls department, with fiddly little racing cars or motorbikes that always seem to be going to fast or too slow. This game hits just the right combination of speed and control, with a two-gear car that allows you to really hit the gas on straight roads and get a kick of maneuverability when you need it most. Mostly, though, I appreciate what the game is doing with its atmosphere. OutRun is less of a race than a road trip on a time limit, and each of the game's locations emphasize that unique take on the genre. From beautiful beaches to rugged deserts and even midwestern farmland, every location in this game is a joy to drive through. Players are given the option of choosing between multiple routes, with different routes having different scenery and obstacles. It's all a very nice package, and I found myself wanting to play it again and again, even after I had already cleared the game.

It was only after I was hooked on OutRun's gameplay that I realized it had two sequels on the Genesis, and I tasked myself with beating both of those games, too.

OutRun 2019

As a sort of spinoff to the first game, OutRun 2019 plays very differently but has largely the same concept. You are tasked with getting in a hot red sports car (or future sports car, as it were) and driving across the country to an unspecified destination in a certain amount of time. Like OutRun, the gameplay is pleasantly breezy and easy to pick up and play, but I ended up finding this game a lot less interesting than its down-to-earth counterpart.

Instead of having a single track with many optional routes, 2019 has you choose from one of four courses like a more traditional racing game. Each of these courses is in the classic OutRun style, with multiple routes, but the selections were more practical and less dramatic. Choosing between a blue city and a green city is a far cry from planning out a cross-country road trip. I also found the visual design of the game a lot harder to parse, with the car taking up more of the screen and the road signs being pushed closer to the edge of my CRT.

The controls were harder to manage, as well. The core feature of this game is the car's ability to build up a second speed meter on top of the first, at which point the car picks up a ludicrous amount of speed but loses almost all of its ability to turn. At first, this made the game almost unplayable, but as I leaned into the gimmick I found that it added a nice strategic wrinkle into the game. I found myself thinking that this car was somehow easier to control than the original Ferrari, and I ended up beating this game's fourth and final stage after only a few tense attempts.

At the end of the day, I like OutRun enough to enjoy this game as well, but the lack of a cohesive theme definitely knocks it down a few pegs in my mind.

OutRunners

For the final game in this collection, I played OutRunners. This is a true blue sequel to the original title, with a few wrinkles. First, the routes cover the entire world instead of one approximation of the USA. Second, there are many cars to choose from, each with their own drivers, gears, and top speeds.

At first I found this game almost completely unapproachable. The controls are much fuzzier than the original OutRun, with some cars having as many as six (!) gears to work through. Thankfully, there is now an automatic drive option, but I was still left with the feeling that the game had gained a lot of complexity that I didn't know how to deal with. Each of the previous games had a very refined simplicity to them, but this game was trying to be something much more, and it threw me for a loop. I lost over and over again to the simplest part of the game, watching the CPU-driven car on the bottom of the screen pass me by... and also run out of time.

That's one of the core features of this game: up to two players can race head-to-head or just drive semi-cooperatively at the same time. To be honest, this feature mostly served to scrunch the visuals and make the screen harder to read, forcing a splitscreen perspective that I didn't want or need to enjoy the game. Busy is the word I would use to describe OutRunners; it is busy in both style and execution, and I felt a sort of rush to finish the game once I realized that I wasn't feeling it in nearly the same way. Maybe it was because of the harsher time limits and the shorter runs, but this game was a lot more frustrating than its previous incarnations. Finally, after grinding out several runs in a row, I switched to this game's version of the Ferrari and very quickly started making progress. One of the biggest limitations to this game, I feel, is that the cars are definitely not equal. It was only by switching back to the classic games' style of car that I was able to slip my racing shoes back on and properly finish it.

Ironically, it ended up being the shortest game on the list. I don't think it's a bad game per say... I would definitely rank it at the bottom of these three games, but you could still easily pick it up and have a fun time.

All in all, I think the first game is the best one.

I think that it has the cleanest execution and visual style, as well as the most challenging and fun content. The reality is that once you're done with one of these games, the other games in the series feel more like add-ons than actual sequels, and I think that somebody who played the games in a different order could have a totally different ranking than I do at this moment.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I think it's about time that I went on another road trip.