Xbox OutRun 2 Announced

[VNZ]

graphics were pretty simply (even on that time scale.)

Not quite. It boosted the by far most impressive sprite scaling to date. The road engine was also in a league of its own.

Music was pretty good actually. (made by Martin Gallway on Commodore 64 version.)

Galway had nothing to do with the C64 conversion. He worked at Ocean at that time, where he did some stunning interpretations of original Konami arcade music. US Gold did all Sega games, though, with Ian W. Crabtree handling the music for Outrun. Nothing special about those tunes, I much preferred to play the included music tape with Hiroshi Miyauchi's original YM2151 music!

[besserwisser-mode off]

 

[Ug Lee]

Why would the PS2 struggle with the draw distance in OutRun2? There's a number of PS2 titles that demonstrate mightily impressive draw distances. Doesn't sound like the sort of area a PS2 version would suffer in. Textures, IQ etc are a different story.

 

[Megadrive1988]

I think the original 1986 OutRun has aged badly, but back then it was the most impressive driving game yet seen.

 

[Lazy8s]

Phil:

Sony and Sega are bringing Outrun 2 exclusively to PS2

Was this ever official?

There was some contention for the property for a while, but MS finally made a bid for keeping Chihiro titles to Xbox and made this deal happen. It'll be interesting to see if they can get Virtua Cop 3, too.

 

[marconelly!]

Well, Saturn VF2 compared better to its arcade counterpart than PS2 VF4 did to the arcade, for example. Ever see the character model comparisons between the Saturn version and the Model 2 version?

I did see them, and Model 2 character models obviously look better. Not saying that VF2 on Saturn was a bad port or anything, but it was slightly downgraded, much like VF4 Evo is on PS2.

 

[Lazy8s]

Seeing the arcade and Saturn versions of VF2 running side-by-side, you'd notice a difference in the character models only upon inspection - not at a glance. And upon inspection, the Saturn models are actually jointed smoother in some cases.

The arcade version packs more geometry (especially on the river stage with the missing bridge), but the Saturn rev stands at a more detailed resolution.

Cutting out half the geometry on the characters for the PS2 versions of VF4 with no striking gain in any other area is more than just a little downgraded technically, in terms of arcade conversions.