OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast
Arcade deliciousness in the palm of your hand (yes, that's a very good thing).
Published: May 6, 2006
Coast 2 Coast Mode basically throws these challenges onto a series of progressively harder courses and gives you unlockable ladies and races led by Flagman, the pudgy guy that waves you off at the starting line of every race. Both are the closest thing the game has to a full-on single-player mode, but it's still just light takes on the simple races and challenges that have already appeared before in other parts, just collected with slowly increasing difficulty and more challenges.
Through all the different modes in the game, you'll accrue OutRun Miles, which are traded in for unlockable content like Ferraris (13 of them in all, ranging from old-school Dino 246 GTS to the Testarossa to the 360 Spider to the SuperAmerica and the oh-god-I-need-new-pants Enzo), paint colors, reversed tracks and new soundtracks. If you have both the PS2 and PSP versions of the game, you can use a USB cable to connect the two and unlock the F355 Spider and 550 Barchetta on your PS2 and the 328 GTS and F430 on the PSP. The rewards are set up so that you can purchse a new car fairly early on, but you'll really have to work to get them all and the new paint colors and the soundtracks.
Luckily, it's not terribly difficult to lose hours playing the game, with the only thing stopping me from playing more being a dead battery (but that was quickly fixed by just playing in a comfy chair with the PSP plugged in). The more I played, the more I realized this was an almost pixel-perfect translation of the game. It's absolutely gorgous, runs at a fairly smooth and consistent clip, and has the all-important sense of speed fully intact. Seriously, you really only need look at the screenshots of the game we've kicked up, but actually playing through some of the levels like the Machu Picchu-esque wind through the mountainous clouds, the SF-inspired bridges of the bay area, and the incredible skylit night near a shuttle take off. It's just a game that continually forces a "woooooow" response, and that's not easy to do these days in the wake of some of the next-gen announcements that have been brewing. This is, without a doubt, the prettiest PSP racer I've ever seen, edging out even WipEout Pure.
It's also something of an aural throwback. As mentioned before, you can spend your OutRun Miles on soundtrack unlocks. Though you'll have to do it a track at a time, all of the OutRun2SP tracks, the original arcade OutRun tunes, remixed Euro-dance versions and even arrangements that thankfully suck the frankly annoying singer our of some of the songs are all here. It's a massive track listing, and icing on what is otherwise a very clean-sounding game. Tire screeches, engine sounds, warning chimes and sound bites are all piped out of the PSP with great clarity.
So OutRun 2006 is a basic rehash of last year's OutRun 2 (fine they added a very generous slipstream feature). And so what if it's basically an arcade racer. It perfectly captures the essence of the original, heaps on graphics that shouldn't be possible on the PSP, and adds an online mode that's just functional enough to make it addictive. Is it a perfect game? Nope, nor is it especially deep, but it is fun, and at their core, that's exactly what games are supposed to be.
And with that I see someone's signed on my buddy list. Now, "mattyboy", whoever you are, you're going down.
