dementedhut's Battle OutRun review

Excellent review! I feel safe ignoring this one's existence. I liked your note about the manual's idea for the ramps, versus the reality. The Sonic burn at the end was unexpected and made me chuckle in agreement. I'm a bit sad Battle Outrun appears to have been handed over to a B-team (or even a C-team) because the idea has potential. Unmet potential, it would appear...

Interesting you mention that about the team, since the game was made by Sega's main console division, R&D 2, that were tasked with making stuff for the Master System and Game Gear. According to what Hideki Sato said in an interview (thanks, shmuplations!), the R&D divisions weren't experienced with making console games at the time, not to mention they were very low staffed.

With that said, I guess it's not too surprising that this game sucks.

Though, apparently the SMS OutRun port was made by the same division, which makes this more strange. I guess you can chalk it up to OutRun being high priority.

Thanks for reading!

" The Sonic burn at the end was unexpected and made me chuckle in agreement."

I too chuckled. But I don't find the core criticism particularly agreeable. The games were important in their essence (and also, the graphics and music are part of the essence of a game), often brilliany even.

I can see where you're coming at with that. One way I can say I view a video game is like looking at a fully constructed Jenga tower: different parts of the tower make up different portions of a game. Some areas can be passably stable, like music or visuals, but if other areas become too shaky for the game to function to the point of not being enjoyable, then the tower falls over. All that's left are remnants of what could have been an overall solid game.

This analogy sounds familiar, so I probably took it from somewhere without realizing it...