I think the Micro Machines brand in general has been in some kind of license hell for a long time.
Whoever owns it released some toys not long ago (they were shit) but that's it.

Edit: oh wait, it's Hasbro. Maybe they can make a film about them or something.

Super RC Pro Am (not exactly top-down but still).

Gave up and started playing something called Cisco Heat which is absolutely insane. Not sure if it's emulating poorly but the super scaler style effects + weird wrap around parallax stuff is spinning my head. It seems to be some sort of mad attempt at an open world racer from 1990. Will post a video later.

I've not played Turbo Outrun. I can't remember whether that or 2019 was supposed to be a true stinker on MD - one of them got rinsed in Sega Power iirc. I might try those and Outrun Europa - heard some wildly mixed opions on that.

hylian_elf wrote:

davyK wrote:

Prob know about them but Vampire Saviour and Darkstalkers have wonderful character design. Capcom built so solid. Got great Saturn ports too.

Not easy games to play. Very tight timing windows on combos and links and very fast paced!

Didn't they use the Ram cart to boost the animation?

Google suggests the one I played was called Night Warriors Darkstalkers' Revenge.

Another cross-posted review:

OutRun 2019 (Mega Drive) - It’s OutRun but set in the implausibly futuristic world of 2019. Your car is now rocket-powered and after travelling at top speed for a while will boost at incredible speeds. You race through four levels, each of which has branching pathways like in the original (but they all reconverge at a singular goal).

There’s some really cool stuff in this. There are now full-enclosure tunnels, bridges made of glass and sections where a second elevated track run over or alongside the regular track, reached by these little ramp car things. I had a quick go of the MD ports of OutRun and Turbo OutRun before this and given those are merely passable and a pale imitation respectively, it’s quite impressive to see these features on the Mega Drive along a decent attempt at putting OutRun style visuals on the Mega Drive. It feels like a technically impressive game. The soundtrack is also pretty nice, not as good as the original obviously but I preferred it to the Turbo OutRun soundtrack.

The game sometimes feels difficult to control. It doesn’t help that the boost is applied automatically, which is honestly pretty annoying. I played in Manual mode and never gear changed after the initial switch to High - I think they should have made the game Automatic only and used the gear-change button to control the boost.

I had a good time with this but it feels slightly less refined than OutRun, Turbo OutRun and Rad Racer. [7]

Are there any good racers for the Atari 2600? Any that are on Atari 50?

Thank you! Can always try the ones not on Atari 50 on the Analogue Pocket.

Currently pirating the Japanese-only first Sega 3D Archives collection so I can play OutRun 3-D for the Master System in the best way possible.

EvilRedEye wrote:

Turbo OutRun (Arcade) - Was just looking at my Analogue Pocket after reading the Retro Club thread and noticed it had an OutRun core. Lo and behold, it also has Turbo OutRun on there, which I’ve never played before.

Unlike the original, this is a linear cross-country dash across America instead of branching path. If you Game Over you can continue by entering another coin. The levels get progressively more difficult and by the end of the game on Normal difficulty I was sometimes having to make multiple attempts at the same level. I feel like this structure is better in terms of playability than the original, which is bitterly difficult unless you change the dip switch settings to make the timer more generous.

You now have a rival racer who tries to steal your girlfriend. The police also occasionally pursue you (apparently you can actually murder them by forcing them into obstacles at the side of the road - this isn’t the naughtiest thing you can do in the game though as you can also drive through fields of wheat). You also have the titular turbo boost which is, well, a turbo boost. If you drive through oil while boosting, it sets the oil on fire, which looks pretty spectacular. Every few levels, you can select a tune-up part to add to your car. These got added to the original game in the Switch version of the original.

I don’t think the tunes are quite as good as the original and inevitably it doesn’t have that nostalgia factor.

A fun OutRun-style racing romp and worth a look if you’ve worn out the original. [8]

I'll have to find the arcade ROM on something now because I just played the MD version of this on my RG353M and it was absolutely horrendous.

I'm going to have to try the arcade Turbo Outrun.

Credits rolling. I enjoyed that.

Outrun - Mega Drive (25mins)

Reasonable MD port from 1991.  It must have been a tough one to squeeze onto the hardware, especially fairly early in its life cycle, so I'll give props to this despite the fact that it unlikely to blow anyone's socks off in terms of 'how did they manage that?!'.  It looks clean and tidy and makes a decent attempt to replicate the splendour of the arcade original, but of course falls well short side by side.  The tunes are all here, plus an extra one for good measure (which sounds more like an off-cut for an alternate ending to Alien Storm to me).  Unfortunately the sound effects take a hit and the skid noise is almost offensive.  It controls well, and weaving between cars feels infinitely better than it does in the MD version of Turbo Outrun, which I played immediately after the credits rolled on this.  I won't review the sequel as I binned it after two attempts, but from what I saw it's a full blown irredeemable stinker.  I love arcade Outrun (which, other than one go on the arcade game once, I first experienced in Shenmue) and this is probably the best of the Sega home ports that required a bit of squashing and tinkering.  In OG form it's the best retro driving game for sure, and I bet plenty of early MD adopters were pretty chuffed with this.  82%  

         

Outrun 2019 - Mega Drive (50mins)

'What if Outrun but set in the future' is an awful idea and I've happily dodged this since release.  Turns out it's actually alright.  No doubt by by the time it appeared in 1993 more was expected of your modern racer, but that sort of thing is less relevant when revisiting/checking out games for a quick look 30 years on.  I mostly agree with ERE's take on this - it's technically impressive, which is wild because I was anticipating peak cash-in shoddiness.  The music is okay (although the tune for the second track got on my nerves) and generally the sound is fine.  

It's still Outrun, replete with branching paths (across four levels this time) and slower traffic to avoid.  Given that this is set in the future (or one possible future), the cars go vroom a bit more spectacularly.  There's a nitro boost now, which is interesting but not practically implemented - it seems to kick in when you've been accelerating for a prolonged stretch of track, but that could coincide with half a dozen sharp turns, rendering it useless and meaning that you'll have to wait another ten seconds or so for it to build back up.  It's an intriguing decision and I suppose it does work for the most part, but a manual turbo would've still been the better design choice imo.  The tunnels look lovely, as do the glass bridges, it's just a shame that the elevated sections were a bit too dastardly considering how much time you lose for full flip crash.  You really want to be getting through those sections unscathed if you plan to complete a level, which is a big ask.  I pushed through with save states but I reckon this would have been a frustrating experience without the ability to cheat on a whim.  Still, I was pleasantly surprised by this on the whole and given that there weren't many 16-bit into-the-screen straight racers I was properly keen on I'd go as far as saying I actually liked it.  It would've been a great game to borrow at the time and without the wow factor of SVP/Super FX chips and whatnot muddying the waters I'd say it's a better game than the initial home port of Virtua Racing.  To think I've walked around assuming this was properly shit since the early 90s!  Tsk.  79%

Okay. So MicroMachines...

Am I just being stupid, or is there no choice of track/ vehicle type?

I remember friends at school raving about this game but this definitely might need nostalgia goggles to enjoy.