Turbo Outrun (Sega Genesis)

Turbo Outrun (Sega Genesis)
Tiertex again butchering a beloved game.
Genre(s): Arcade Racing Platform(s): Sega Genesis Release Date: March 27, 1992 Developer(s): Tiertex Design Studios Publisher(s): Sega Country: United Kingdom

Turbo Outrun is a Arcade racing game, developed and published by Sega in 1989 for the Arcades. In March 27, 1992, the game received a port to the Sega Genesis by Tiertex to every country except for North America. The original game, despite receiving criticism for the removal of some classic features like the branching path and multiple endings mechanics, was well received by gamers. This port however was not the case, Tiertex didn't know anything about Outrun, this made working with them a disaster and the game suffered as a result.

Why It Sucks

1. The game has an awful soundtrack, hardly on pair with games released to this point on the plattaform. Each track sounds with a really high pitch and lack instruments, and it makes you wanna either mute the TV and put your own music, or cut your ears off. And the worst offender of the soundtrack is the Game Over one.
2. The game looks bad for the time it came, in fact it looks worse than the port of the original Outrun for the same console, with dull colors, missing detail present, lame backgrounds with many elements removed, and overall, the visual presentation is extremely rough.
3. The framerate for a racing game is dreadful, and it fails to provide any sense of speed since the game doesnt seem to reach 20 FPS, and in the end, the game feels more like an awful Amiga or MS-Dos port than a Genesis game.
   • But fortunately, it isn't bad as Amiga port's.
4. The framerate also causes problems in gameplay, because of the choppy scrolling you will have a lot of trouble taking curves as you will not see them at time, which will cause you too crash constantly.
5. The controls are complete crap. The car slips and slides all over the place, and once it does, its almost impossible to get it back on track, which will make you crash constantly and lose time, ruining your chances to beat this game.
6. Despite being against logic and not being possible in the orginal, taking curves while using Turbo doesnt make taking them any harder than it already was, more stupid yet, spamming it is the only way to get anywhere in this game, due to the constant crashing.
7. The ending looks dreadful, and has an animation that looks incomprehensible.
8. Upgrading you car does practically nothing, your experience will not change, specially if you upgraded the tires, as your car will still slide everywhere.
9. Difficulty-wise, it's brutal, much more than the Arcade, all because of the overall abysmal design of the game. As a plus, the game barely gives you more time once you cross a checkpoint.
10. The opponent cars get a lot more in your way than they did in the arcade, trucks specially block your path all the time, and due to the awful controls its hard to pass them.
11. No replay value, even if you want to try the game in another difficulty, as it will not change anything. That's correct. The difficulty settings are completely redundant, as they dont change anything at all, nor the number of opponent cars, nor the amount of time!

Redeeming Qualities

1. Unlike the most of Tiertex's games, this game at least is passable.
2. Some sprites and colors are almost the same.
3. The background switching animation is better in this version, which it is smooth.
4. The vehicle now has sound, unlike the Sega Genesis port of Outrun which it doesn't have.

Reception

Magazines of the time gave the game average to negative scores. MEGA gave the best score with a 53%, however Mean Machines and MegaTech were more critical, giving the game a 42% and 41% respectively. Joe Reddifer mentioned the game in Game Sack's Piss Poor Ports 3, were he said "pick this game up if you wanna die a little".

Trivia

• The game was also released for Mega-Tech.
• The port was originally to be ported by Sega's third-party company, Hertz, to port Outrun on the Mega Drive and they did a good job, however, Hertz didn't port the game, instead by Tietrex.
• The game has infinite time cheat code. At the title screen, on Control Pad 2, press A, C, B, A, B, C, B, C, B, A, C, A. The timer will now freeze at 1 second remaining.
• An enchanted color hack exists that makes the game a bit better and almost looks like arcade original due to the missing objects, despite there's no huge improvement hack, check out here.
• Turbo Outrun was never ported (or even mentioned) again by Sega, as it's been completely neglected by Sega over the years.

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