GamesRadar+ Verdict

Pros

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Fast driving!
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Purty visuals!
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Cute blonde passenger!

Cons

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It's Outrun 2
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minus many tracks and cars
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Strangely minimal menus
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Smells of upcoming content purchases

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It’s really very simple. You drive fast; it looks pretty; a lovely blonde urges you on. Yep, Outrun is really very, very simple. Outrun was born in a time when games were dumb as hell. It was a good time rammed with simple thrills and instantly accessible excitement. In the 80s nobody was especially concerned with physics, simulated car handling, real-world tracks, or halfway-decent clothing. All that mattered was going fast in a flashy car. Keeping things simple, Sega gave you a Ferrari, a girl, and miles of branching road. Take the left path and things stayed easy; take the right and they got hard.

Outrun 2 - in spite of Outrun games numbering significantly higher than two – was everything 80s brought up to date. Modern visuals, fabulous widescreen, remixed music, and the same loon-o-handling and branching tracks. It was a slice of simple fun for simple gamers, with infinite opportunity to shave milliseconds off your best times and scores. The Coast 2 Coast expansion came later, and added a new course with another fifteen routes, and a big bag of minigames. Outrun Online Arcade is this, minus a great deal, and that’s a problem.

Presumably to scrape within the 350Mb download limit, Outrun Online Arcade has dropped all fifteen original courses, along with several cars. The girl in the passenger seat is still a needy, clingy thrill-junkie fruitcake but where Outrun 2 gave you a choice between girls, Arcade sticks you with the blonde. Even the front-end’s menus are stark and spartan, short on the earlier games’ slick presentation.