Afterburner was one of my favourite arcade addicting games as a kid growing up. A lot of people attribute Afterburners success to its fantastic graphics which used similar hardware to Outrun and Super Hang On. The graphics certainly were excellent. The scenery flies by so fast you almost believe you are Tom Cruise flying a F14 Tomcat! In a similar way to Outrun, I think the Afterburner graphics still looked amazing even five years later.
But it wasn't just the graphics that were stunning. The fast paced scenery contributed to super frantic gameplay which saw you dodging head-on missiles which was the enemies primary attack. Faced with wave after wave of missile firing jets, you are a one-man army in a jetplane! As well as dodging planes and firing your own missiles as they lock on to targets, you can also adjust your speed, from a slow braking cruise to a super-fast 'afterburners on' boost. A lot of the time the afterburners are just for show, although you do have to use them to avoid missiles chasing you from behind!
Arcade Classics
Your machine guns are there for shooting down planes stupid enough to fly in front of you! They will also come in handy when taking the two canyon runs so you can strafe campsites, fuel depots and communication towers! In another nice touch, you see the bike from Super Hang On in the first canyon run and then the Ferrari car from Outrun in the second one. Afterburner is one of the most addicting games once you get in to the fast paced action and to top it off it has some incredible rock music up there with Sega's best. If you are interested in old video games, you might also be interested in how you can make money by creating traffic with content and then sending that traffic either to Amazon or a business offer that will teach you how to market on the internet. For more information on how I make money, click here.
Wow, where to begin with one of the biggest icons of my childhood. I have fond memories of being on holiday and getting myself into trouble because I had spend too much money on Outrun!
As a kid I only got to visit arcades when I was on holiday or day tripping at a seaside resort so I can't really remember my very first encounter with Outrun although I had probably seen screenshots in a computer magazine before getting the chance to play the outrun arcade machine. Sega really hit gold with the design brief for Outrun. You get to race a gleaming red open-top Ferrari Testarossa with your blonde girlfriend sat in the passenger seat covering various stages from the starting point at the sea-front, to tunnel ruins, tulip fields and desert.
Right at the start of the game, in bright sunshine and sega-blue sky, your Ferrari skids from the side to the starting grid in front of a captive audience. The flag is waved, and the fast paced racing begins and never falters until you either run out of time or finish the five stage run. I feel I have to talk first about the fantastic graphics, which were ground-breaking at the time. What you have to remember was Outrun came out in 1986! I remember still being wowed by the game five years or more later and thinking wow this game is really standing the test of time. Technically, Outrun wasn't using a brand new ground breaking engine. We had seen similar visuals in Space Harrier, but where that game was pure fantasy, Outrun took the impressive sprite scaling to a whole new level in the context of road racing. The other cars for example, although flat sprites they were designed in such a way and scaled so smoothly as you got closer that they really did look 3D at the time.
Other design features that boosted Outruns already flashy visuals were the way roads scaled up and down simulating the rise and fall of hills. The roadside scenery was also taken to a new level for the time introducing much larger road side objects and in fact one of the stages sees you racing underneath ruined tunnel pillars, which still maintains its hypnotic effect even today! The general sense of speed was also very accomplished. The stage selection mechanism was also innovative, instead of choosing your stage at the start you could branch left or right at the end of each stage opening up a pyramid of a total of 15 stages with 5 possible endings. Gameplay was pretty much spot on, all you could ever ask of an arcade racer. Steering sharply made the car skid continuously towards the edge of the bend possible inventing the arcade-style powerslide mechanic. Outrun was much more forgivable than Super Hang Onwhich I reviewed earlier, you had to be really rubbish to not be able to get to the second stage and this forgiveness extended to the ability to recover some crashes by changing down, spinning your Ferrari and then carrying on! The cherry on the already very tasty cake was of course the amazing soundtrack.
Yet another innovation allowed you to select your music on the radio at the start and each of the three tracks were lively up-beat happy melodies that had a carribbean vibe. But I never could decide which was better Magical Sound Shower or Splash Wave! Sega would go on to create more awesome games like Super Hang On and Afterburner. Check out my other reviews. If you are interested in old video games, you might also be interested in how you can make money by creating traffic with content and then sending that traffic either to Amazon or a business offer that will teach you how to market on the internet. For more information on how I make money, click here.
Back in the late Eighties, when OutRun was still wowing audiences in Arcades, Sega released the sequel to the very successful motor bike racing game Hang On. Super Hang On featured OutRun's undulating hills and also introduced a turbo boost that could only be activated once the top speed had been reached.
I didn't very often get the chance to play the arcade version of Super Hang On and the chances are you are more likely to have played the Megadrive (or Genesis in the US) home console version. This review however is based on the arcade version available today via the MAME arcade emulator. When playing the arcade version for the first time (either ever or for several years) there are two things that immediately hit you. The first thing is how awesome the games soundtrack is. Now I realize nostalgia plays a part here, but great video game soundtracks should not be taken for granted. With Super Hang On you get not one, but FOUR soundtracks to choose from before you start.
Admittedly, one of the tracks is a bit rubbish, but the other three are great and two in particular Outride A Crisis and Winning Run are outstanding. The second thing you will notice is how bloody hard this game is! You really do need to 'Hang On' as the pace is fast and furious with extremely tight time limits. This really is old school gameplay, most of your games literally last 90 seconds each as you try to reach the third or fourth stage! As with most successful arcades of the era though, Super Hang On certainly has addictive qualities (they had to be good enough to convince you to spend more money!) and you can find yourself playing ten games in a row even if progress seems to be almost non-existent. I was playing with a 360 joypad and found that the analogue controls were too sensitive and try as I might to adjust the settings in MAME's tab menu it didn't seem to make any difference.
In fact, even changing the difficulty setting to 'easy' also didn't seem to make much difference. You can, if you really want to switch the timer off in the cheat menu. But without cheating, I think the best I managed was like stage 5 on any of the 4 selectable continents! The game does benefit from enhancing the video display, again in MAME's tab menu settings. Also, if you are using a widescreen monitor, don't forget to shrink the horizontal size of the screen just to make it that little bit more authentic! It is also worth noting the differences to the Megadrive version and the Arcade. Back in those days the term 'Arcade perfect' was over-used, only because before 16-bit consoles were launched we just hadn't seen such colourful graphics in the home before. However, the Megadrive version is by no means arcade perfect. It does not have the silky smooth 60fps of the arcade, and while the music is pretty much spot-on, the in-game special effects are very inferior. So, Super Hang On is one of my favourite arcade games but it is brutally hard and also demonstrates how addictive good quality racing gameplay can be! If you are interested in old video games, you might also be interested in how you can make money by creating traffic with content and then sending that traffic either to Amazon or a business offer that will teach you how to market on the internet. For more information on how I make money, click here.
