Outrun2 Demo

[tyler]

Online?

Oh yes.
Since the Single Player lasts about 3-4 minutes, its a good job.

[Bleeders]

So, my local Game emporium should have the demo?

[razu]

Wooooooo hoooooooo!!! This is the reason I bought an Xbox, when the arcade game was announced to be on the same HW. Oh how they laughed, but who's laughing now people who laughed at me but aren't laughing anymore, eh? Me!! That's who.

Through the power of magic I acquired a copy even though work finishes at 5:30 and Game shuts then too.

Right, I've had a few goes now. Initial impressions:

Controls work fine. I prefer the cab, but hey, this will have to do. The steering just works, not too twitchy, not too slow. Gears on right stick, down for change up, up for change down, a la arcade. Turned that buzzy vibration off. Sliding out still fills me with joy. Dab the brake or flip the gears down and up to initiate, and wheeeeeeeeeeeee...

Lesser groovy colour picking mechanism: press X. BUT!!! There are loads more colours and the car changes colour rather than BW, YL, SL or whatever appeared before in the arcade.

In the options menu you can set sfx vol, music vol, brightness, vibration, difficulty, speedo mph kmh and gear change arcade or inverted. Difficulty defaults to Normal, which leaves Hard and Very Hard to get us through to the release of the real deal.

Gfx are the same from what I can tell. From reading the Chihiro specs I reckon the only difference would be texture use. BUT, I can't tell the difference if it is different. The geometry will be the same as the gpu is the same. To summarise: it looks the ****. If it does look different side by side then hey, but I'd put it down to arcade monitors vs what you play on at home. The framerate has been 60 frames per second throughout. AND, IF the textures are smaller then there'd be less to pump through the machine so framing out would be LESS likely. Yizz-ay!!

Sound. Music. Heh. Well, there's Splash Wave... Passing Breeze... and, hmmm, what's that RUBBISH one called? Oh yeah, Magical Sound Shower I think. So yeah, COMPLETELY RUBBISH music all round
The engines are awesome, real raspy bastard Ferrari piston gear oil chicks and rubber-laying sons of britches.

Presentation is good all round, menus: nice. Screens: slick.

Sumo Digital have done a very good job. Lets hope they don't go under all lose their jobs like every other phucker in the world seems to be doing in the industry at the moment. Hey, I've been made redundant this year, it does not do teh r0x0rz!!

Online - don't have Live, sorry. But I bet it will be super cool, if that helps

Can't wait for the complete doo-dah.

I have the front end running as I type and there's a very nice waves lightly crashing onto a beach loop playing. Man, I want a Ferrari, a blonde chick, open roads and a sunny day! Suppose I'll have to make do with my Clio, my brunette gf, settee and a nice sunsetting night, beer, chinese and an assload of OR2 Even better, it's an Xbox game so it doesn't tie up the ps2, so I can have Gradius on at the same time and alternate between the two by power of SCART switch. **** the bed!!!

[dc-arena]

LOL Nice one Razu, I am glad you liked the magic trick I pulled today to get Outrun to ya bud

I love it. Its just so DAMN!

I am switching to projector and 5.1 mode to see how it is there, then online. Awesome. I love that SFX on the cars- that raasp! right at the top end of the revs, sounds ****ing mint and very realistic (hey I have been in a F355). Sumo, you are gods.



Cry now. Outrun2 is home.

[VR46]

So, my local Game emporium should have the demo?

Where's your local ? Romford and Lakeside have em

[razu]

Right, played it a bit more now. Playing very hard and have nearly completed a run, (97% on final stage).

Two points:

It forgets your transmission selection from last time but remembers the colours you picked for cars, (individually, so each car stays the colour you picked it last). One or the other people!

I misheard Magical Sound Shower as Vaginal Sound Shower. I may never get that out of my mind.

[Bleeders]

Where's your local ? Romford and Lakeside have em

Oh yes, thanks for that fella.

Will get down for 9 then me thinks.

[bignige]

With regards to online play, if you join a game and it's already started - there's no way of knowing - the lobby looks like it waiting for people. Although you can actually chat to people whilst waiting for them to finish. Probably best to ask if they is in the middle of a race!
Knocking in to other cars is a bit bouncy, but on the whole it's very good and looks fantastic. Had a few games against Yoshimoto who kicked my ass!

Although you can only select the Spider online, I'm sure I raced against a couple of F50's? Maybe it's unlockable on hard?

[[email protected]]

well had a quick blast and this rocks. the demo is multi region and supports 480p and it might also be 720p need to confirm this tho... i delivered a copy of the demo to marcus gaming fraternity party

[Hodge]

Been playing the demo most of the evening and the game just gets better and better. Congrats to sumo for doing an excellent job on converting the handling to the pad cause i had my doubts at first but after a few races i was pulling drifts of just as i`ve been doing in the arcades with no probs at all. Furthur comments on the online side is the collision detection with other players which at first i wasn`t to sure about seems quite good overall as bumping into people doesn`t slow you down to much or take you of your line. Also noticed an traffic option for the online side so it looks like you can compete with one another with traffic even though this isn`t available in the demo. Also while racing with some folks of rllmuk in quite a few insidances 2 of us kept coming joint 1st a few times and showed the result as our names over one another for 1st and 2nd place was left blank, i`d be very very suprised if this don`t get fixed for the final release. I Also managed to complete the solo demo on very hard but it hasn`t given me anything. Overall though a very generous demo and has probably been my most played demo of all time

[C']

Afterplaying this game an absolute ton in the arcade, to say I was excited to get even a taster at home is putting it mildly. Impressions, mostly good but one or two things bug me.

The good:

Graphically this truely gorgeous. Arcade perfect? Well to be honest, wihout running them side by side it is difficult to tell but it is incredibly accurate and if there are any sacrifices that have been made, then they are not immediately noticeable and probably not worth worrying about anyway.

All the arcade options seem to be present and correct (as would be expected) and the online options seem pretty comprehensive as well. Although most are greyed out for the demo, the ability to limit races to certain cars, catch up on/off etc. are all present and correct. My only slight worry is that one of the unselectable options is called 'Route'. My initial trepidation over this is that online play may forse you to select which route will be taken (as in Time Attack mode) before the race begins whereas in the arcade game in a versus battle the person who leads choosing the route at each junction, and for the lagging players, the ignored route is closed off. hopefully online play will offer a 'Free Route' option as well.

The analog triggers work brilliantly for the accelerator/brake pedals and offer exactly the same amount of control as their arcade counterparts. The ability to control speed, angle and tracjectory of your drift through measured pressure on the accelerator is replicated perfectly. Was really impressed with this as my foot pedal techniques for the drifts were able to be transferred over immediately.

Oh and it's OutRun 2 ffs. That is worth about 10 extra good points on its own.

The bad:

Whilst the replication of the pedals is awesome, personally I feel the same cannot be said for the steering. The analog stick offers nowhere near the same amount of sublety and accuracy in control as it's arcade counterpart. This may be a personal thing, and one that I may get accustomed to but I found that there was a distincitve lack of pressure against steering which made subtle movements incredibly tricky. It's something I've never liked in using the stick for racing games (always preferred a good FF wheel) but I think my time playing the arcade version has emphasised this problem more. When I first played I'll admit the car was all over the place as even the slightest nudges seemed to produce wild swings across the track. I did become more accustomed to it and was able to take long sweeping lines through the bends, but it still doesn't compare. Correcting mistakes is much harder and can often result in the front end of the car frantically toing and froing in an attempt to straighten out. Will probably grow accustomed to this and initially thought it was my lack of expertise using the Xbox stick, but after playing online loads of times, every opponent has at least on one occasion shown the same frantic moments across the track.

Online play is for the most part great. Smooth, lag free and seemingly bustling with customisation options. However, there was one feature that happened too many times that infuriated me and personally has the chance to ruin online play. The collision system in an online race is atrocious. This is not an issue with collision detection (that seems great but also I have yet to play online with traffic), but specifically what happens when someone collides into you. I can best demonstrate it with an example:

Was placed first on the second stage on the second bridge coming up to that long swinging banked curve before the smaller cobbled bridge. I took what I consider to be a really good line through the cornerand hit the apex almost perfectly (without drifting) well all of sudden the second place racer comes drifting onto screen and is about to hit me from behined. Instead of hitting me the once, his car bumped into mine repeatedly and my speed dropped sharply with each hit (and his drift continued during this time) after about 5 hits his car shot straight through and shifted forward a good second or more further up the track whilst I had to downshift to 4th to accelerate up to full speed again.

Frankly, I find this system completely the opposite of what should happen in an arcade racer. For the person being collided into to be penalised for shoddy overtaking on his opponents part is bad enough but for said opponent to then shoot forward further up the track is really crappy. If this had been a one off incident I could have let it 'slide' (haha) but it happened several times.

Oh and the traffic AI seems to be more stupid than the arcade game. I've noticed computer cars change lane and bump into another AI vehicle on more than one occasion.

However, despite these niggly flaws I was still addicted to playing the same 3 stages over and over tonight and can't wait for the final game. The handling is something I will be sure to grow accustomed to and hopefully the online collision stuff can be sorted as well.

[Lyrical Donut]

Instead of hitting me the once, his car bumped into mine repeatedly and my speed dropped sharply with each hit (and his drift continued during this time) after about 5 hits his car shot straight through and shifted forward a good second or more further up the track whilst I had to downshift to 4th to accelerate up to full speed again.

Just had a few more games of this, and I've been going down a straight with a car beside me. They started turning into the corner early and kept bumping the side of me... and my speed shot right down :/

A little disconcerting.. I hope something gets done about it in the final release.

[Hodge]

I`ve had quite abit of that during my races online but after having a think about it i didn`t think it was to bad overall as the loss of speed is minimal and could be far far worse and it doesn`t shift you of your line hardly either so you can always catch straight back up with them which means the racing is always tight. I personally don`t think the network code is as good as pgr2 as the collision detection on gotham is like playing on a LAN but i`m still pretty impressed with it overall. Still these very minor gripes will probably be cleared up for the final release.

[C']

The loss of speed I received was not minimal. Like I said I had to drop to 4th gear in order to start accelerating again which means I went from around 200km/h+ to around 150km/h (whilst at the same time he suffered no speed loss whatsoever - he seemed to get a little boost actually). After that there was no chance whatsoever for me to get back into the race.

But at the end of the day Hodge, whether I lost 50 km/h or 5km/h is irrelevant. Why should the leading player be penalised for shoddy overtaking on his opponent's part?

[Hodge]

When your head to head racing online theres always gonna be bumping involved with one another, it can`t be helped. Also with these tracks not being the widest and when in drift mode you are taking up most of the circuit it`s gonna be expected to get a few knocks. As for being penalised for being in first place, well it happens on all online racing games with it happening unacountable times on pgr2 with me getting rammed into a barrier cause of the person late braking behind me. Your options are turn collisions of if you don`t like getting punished or turn catch up of, that way if you your good enough you will break away from them. Or play with players who are gonna let of on there drifts around bends so they don`t hit you (there won`t be many though). Perhaps i have more tollerence for this than you C as i`ve been playing online racers on live since the beta trial of live and know theres not much that can be done about it. But at the end of the day if your good enough you will always shine through and get the result.