Virtua Racing Deluxe (Sega 32X) review "Polygon in Sixty Seconds"

I’m going to spoil the surprise twist ending early today and just tell you now that the best home port of SEGA’s ridiculously influential arcade racer, Virtua Racing, is this one. The one on the 32X. Yes, really. I know, I didn’t see that coming either.

I guess it’s a surprise for me because Virtua Racing was such a game changing title. It was the glorious herald to the Model 1 board SEGA would use to reign iron-fisted dominance over the arcade scene until it collapsed in on itself, and it was the patriarch of the Virtua series that still exists today (even if it’s exclusively through Virtua Fighter). Brought about by serial success artists Yu Suzuki and the rest of AM2, it took Outrun-esque arcade racing and updated the bejesus out of it. Though it shared many of the foundation mechanics arcade racers had always relied upon (X amount of time on the clock; race until the timer hits zero with numerous checkpoints granting you precious extra seconds for each you pass), it brought to life many of the features we take for granted today. Things like numerous camera angles and 3D poly-shaded graphics had all been done before, but not to the level SEGA presented. It then housed this in a gloriously chunky arcade cabinet made to look like the back end of an F1 car, linked it in to similar cabinets so you could race against your friends, and revelled in their station as the undisputed crown jewel of any arcade.

Then came the poisoned chalice of all arcade smashes; the obligatory home console port. The irony of the situation there being that arcades were still alive and well at that time because the then 16bit-capped home consoles of the generation had considerably less power. The most advanced games still required you to feed them quarters. Still, SEGA went all out for Virtua Racing’s home debut by tricking out the Mega Drive release by inserting a virtual processing chip into each cartridge. On the plus side, this enabled SEGA to get more out of its aging console than anyone would have ever imagined; suddenly, the little black box was able to seriously mimic arcade processing power. But it came at a price. A literal price; these chips weren’t cheap, and would never be used again. Copies of Virtua Racing went at a premium of around $100 a pop.



It’s a lot of money, but the things it managed to do was mind blowing. It wasn’t arcade perfect – let’s be reasonable – but it managed to keep pace with the original to a startling degree. It wasn’t as much to look at, sure, and it lost a lot of the arcade perks like the sexy cabinet and a working gearbox, but it maintained a multiplayer aspect via split screen, kept all the arcade’s tracks and most of its BGM. When it was announced as a launch title for the upcoming 32X, it was assumed the add-on would make for a suitable substitute for the virtual chip, and much of the same was expected. No, said AM2. Screw that.

Virtua Racing Deluxe is an unapologetic powerhouse, making its costly 16bit predecessor look like a fumbling plebe. It runs smoother, controls better, returns all the missing BGM and then plays them at a significantly better quality. The arcade version has better draw, looks sharper and has bigger vehicles, sure, but there’s a much smaller gap between the two than you might expect. But this just wasn’t good enough for AM2. They needed more than simply stomping out their home competition, and they set their sights on outdoing their own arcade phenomenon. So two extra tracks were added. Not enough? Fine; the original game had you pelt around said tracks in an F1 car. The 32X strain added in two new vehicles labelled “Stock” and “Prototype” and, not content on them being simple reskins of the F1 racer, they each have completely different driving mechanics.

Normally, this is the time when, after I’ve lauded a 32X home port, I would then go on to say that the console was made obsolete very shortly thereafter and SEGA’s redoubled efforts in championing the 32bit Saturn produces a superior port to match their superior hardware. Except, no. Not this time. Because shit gets weird quick; you’d assume the obligatory Saturn port would be handed by AM2, the company that showed masochistic levels of dedication in trying to outdo themselves when no other developer could get near them. Instead, the game gets farmed out to Time Warner Interactive, a fledgling company created after Time Warner purchased both Atari and Tengen, then mashed them all together into one developer blob. Not a single person who worked on any of the three previous iterations of Virtua Racing was involved in the making of the Saturn port. Which wasn’t really a port at all; it was a game made from the ground up to slightly resemble that other game that everyone already loved. It was given the hilariously awful name of Time Warner Interactive’s V.R.: Virtua Racing.



AM2 were probably pretty pleased about how it actively tried to distance itself from their coeval racer, because, though ambitious, Time Warner Interactive’s V.R.: Virtua Racing was a dud. It played a big hype game, promising a lot of cool extras never seen before; more tracks, more cars, more modes! Not outright lies, all those things exist, but they only manage to cumulate into a detriment. The F1 racer and the 32X vehicles all make an appreciated return, and do so alongside others, such as karts, and there are a number of new tracks included. But you can only use them in the laborious Grand Prix mode which forces you into endless-feeling races consisting of ten overlong laps the drag on until the end of days. An arcade mode was included, but it’s insulting bare bones and feels unfinished and untested. Also, you can’t use any of the new vehicles – not even the 32X ones. Just the F1 car for you. Also, you can’t race on any of the new tracks. Just the original three.

It handles poorly, it looks noticeably worse than the Mega Drive version at times, let alone the 32X strain, and its very existence makes no sense to anyone. Why farm it out to another developer? Why let those developers make their own significantly lacking game? In hindsight, a functional straight port from the 32X would have been a significant improvement. It’s baffling; instant success and critical acclaim where just an open goal away, but SEGA blasts it over the bar and out of the stadium.

None of that nonsense for Virtua Racing Deluxe, a game that honoured its virtual foundations, but wasn’t afraid to build upon them. It’s precisely the kind of game you might show someone to challenge their thinking that the 32X was just a dumb failure. It’s precisely the kind of game you might play and wonder why the system will go down in history as exactly that.

Staff review by Gary Hartley (July 27, 2019) Gary Hartley arbitrarily arrives, leaves a review for a game no one has heard of, then retreats to his 17th century castle in rural England to feed whatever lives in the moat and complain about you.