"Don't believe the hype."

I bought this game based on the idea placed in my head that it was the follow up to Outrun on the arcades. I have also read on several other websites, that it is a bright, colourful and loud racer that is a pixel perfect conversion of the original arcade version.

This game is awful, and as I have said before - considering the amount of money people are expected to shell out for the likes of it these days, one would love to see if the expression on their faces matches mine when I first played it.

I personally don't remember seeing Gale Racer in British arcades in the late 80's. But what I tend to do when I play these retro Sega games, is imagine what I would have thought if I had played them in the arcades at the time they were out.

Galaxy Force 2, Outrun etc, are all arcade perfect. Power drift is too in my opinion, and they are all fun to play.

Gale racer is unpleasant to play, and my first thoughts on seeing it in action were 'Christ imagine wasting money sticking ten pees in a machine to play this!'

The gameplay is simple. Race through a course and beat the other cars to the finish line. The courses are all pretty short and take about a minute, tops, to get through. The road is made up of badly constructed sprites, and the game uses the old Sega patented sprite scaling method to keep everything going. Unfortunately, whereas it works with Afterburner, it does not work here. There is an unforgivable amount of flicker and glitching on the road surface and decor, and the enemy cars flash on and off as well. The car is also ridiculously difficult to keep on the road, mainly because the road appears to be only a metre wider than the car! The sound effects are awful, the engine noise is an infuriating monotonous screech and is very unrealistic, and even the FMV cutscenes are running at about 5 frames per second for Gods sake! Everything about it is bad, including the average price of the game itself. People are expected to pay out over GBP30, and it simply isn't worth it.

This game is not a patch on the Sega Saturn releases of Chase HQ, Power Drift or Outrun. However if you are a retro game freak, and simply have to have every retro title released on the console, then go ahead. But I guarantee, you will not play this for long, if at all.

The only effect that made me comment on it with a smile on my face was the Sonic the Hedgehog swinging from the cars internal mirror. It was funny because it swings like crazy even when the car isn't moving! They couldn't even get that right!

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 12/15/03