OutRun, positively surprised

[dlfrsilver]

Turbo Outrun, Outrun Europe is better ported for most platforms I think. Outrun (the original) however, is the game many people misses a decent port for, because it has so much potential and originality. The later Turbo Outrun and the unofficial sequel Outrun Europa feels more like just another driving game.

Turbo outrun is also a junk game. The amiga version has no "timing" involved (as Stingray discovered when patching the game under whdload), it's slow as hell... look :

"The game had a major problem on fast machines, it was simply unplayable because there was no timing at all. Since the code is very slow on a
plain 68000 as A500 coder didn't feel like adding any sync with the raster beam hence game is unplayable on fast machines."

Once again it's an ST port, and only outrun Europa has a decent framerate.

[Marakatti]

Turbo Outrun in 16Mhz is not that bad at all

[StickHead]

Outrun was in one of the STfm game packs, wasn't it?... Time may have tarnished your memory of things but didn't it take ABSOLUTELY AGES to load (something around 5 minutes)? IIRC in the same pack was Super Hang On, which was a far better conversion (and loaded a damn site faster).

It was in my uncle's Power Pack that he got when he bought the ST. I remember waiting with anticipation, frustrated by the long load time (my memory being very short, as only yesterday we were waiting for 15minutes or more for Amstrad CPC tape games to load) and thinking we were going to be treated to an arcade like experience. Boy, were we disappointed! I don't think we ever bothered with it again after that first play, and why would we? So many great games in that pack!

[mlynn1974]

I got Outrun on the Spectrum first and it was very, very slow.

I remember at the time friends saying that the ST version looked great, but when we played it 2 years later it was a bit underwhelming. The ST version of the car looked very "flat" or wide. The detailing on the car was better on the Spectrum than the ST. Perhaps they were under pressure to release it for the lucrative Christmas market. They even allowed mouse input and didn't even switch off the keyboard click!

Porting Cannonball to the ST would be very limited with only 16 colours and no hardware scaling. Demo coders would probably remove the lower border to get 320x224 to make the screen a bit more like the original arcade. Rasters for the sky would have been a good idea. Fitting it all into 800kB would be challenging.

Outrun is my favourite arcade game of all time and all versions of Outrun are worth playing. Even if for the "how did they get away with that" factor!