"How far are you gonna take me?"

A palate-cleanser after a week of driving a Testarossa and an F50 around the technically impressive but virtually soulless Forza Horizon 5. After Microsoft forced me against my will to play a mission called "#SQUADGOALS", I knew I needed to play a driving game with real romance in its heart.

I'm sure one of the best reviews on this whole site was of this game, and it said something to the effect of "OutRun 2 understands that making your girlfriend happy is the ultimate game", but I can't find it because it's super-hard to sift through Backloggd data. So let me re-iterate that statement and say that more video games should implement mechanics centred around satisfying the whims of a romantic companion. Funny that it's a driving game that best understands romance as a chain of dangerous manoeuvres through risk and reward to keep a ticking timer alive.

The Quick Play mode dropping you in as a white-sheet Ferrari that's hopelessly, perpetually chasing the ghosts of the iconic OutRun F50 feels like the developers saying that they could never hope to catch the original game, but god damn did they come close. A testament to how well-built this thing is under the hood that it feels endlessly replayable without even going into the submenus to find mission modes, time trials or unlocks. Just glad that my long-past self unlocked all the songs, because all I wanna do is handbrake and swing tail to this beat all night: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypiaPp3xMPo

A genuine artistic crime that a video game masterpiece like this is trapped in a prison made of licensing - surely Sega and Ferrari can work things out? Sega are rich now! They make movies! Ferrari's big red cars come off better here than they do in Forza, but I guess it would pain a modern-day corporation to admit their products might be inhabited by living souls - the girlfriend in OutRun 2 has more personality in her little 2-polygon pinky than all 132GB of what Horizon 5 is offering us.

You've got a heart, right? Go on, try this game out - you can set up PPSSPP, download the .bin file and complete a race to the finish in the time it takes your PC to download the first gig of Forza! Men with guts play OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast!

NEXT STAGE: GIANT STATUES

"Try to get as many 'HEARTS' as possible by meeting your girlfriend's demands."

In my review for the original OutRun, I referred to the game as an "i-15 simulator." Its distinctly Californian vistas and the frequency in which you pay witness to the most horrific car crashes imaginable rouse fond memories of nearly losing my life repeatedly on trips to and from my grandparent's home in Orange. Oh good, it was just a bus full of tourists that collided with a semi-truck and overturned, not me. Whew. Think I'll stop off for some McDonalds and pay triple the normal value for fries.

The original OutRun is a near-perfect simulacrum of this experience, and so it goes without saying that OutRun 2006's improved fidelity and more fluid controls provides a more accurate translation of that unique vibe. As with OutRun, your journey begins along the shore and branches out along one of several routes towards the more mountainous regions of California, and it's for this reason I picked it as one of the last games to play during my 2023 Summah Games series. It represents the trip back home. The vacation is over, it's time to leave the beaches and boardwalks behind and begin that long, harrowing trek back towards the drudgery of your everyday life - back to work and responsibilities, to the tired and familiar. It's the victory lap, and one last taste of Summah.

While the Shadow the Hedgehog-esque progression system accounts for a significant chunk of OutRun's replay value, Coast 2 Coast introduces a slew of additional modes and unlockables to pad out the game. Thankfully, a lot of this side content is worthwhile, and I personally found Heart Attack mode to be one of the more enjoyable parts of the game. In Heart Attack, you have to meet your girlfriend's "demands" in order to win her affection in addition to juggling your overall time. Girlfriends, am I right? All they do is nag, nag, nag. "Baby, take the trash out. Baby, you need to pay your bills. Baby, collect all the coins while drifting between traffic." Ugh. The ol' ball and chain...

The only real problem I had with OutRun 2006 is one that is uniquely me. I've spoken before about how I've been playing most PS2 games off a hard drive, and whether I just grabbed a bad dump of the game or there's some issue with the way Coast 2 Coast is being read in general, the soundtrack would not play for me at all. This is kind of a big deal, as anyone familiar with OutRun as a series would probably tell you. Listening to the radio is not only a major part of tying these games to the experience of racing through California, but the soundtrack is just really damn good. I resorted to playing the OST on my laptop, so this wasn't a total loss, but playing a deconstructed OutRun is less than ideal. Maybe I'll shell out 60$ for a used copy one day, but I'm not sure I like OutRun 2006 that much.

I'm going to eschew the Summah Index Scale for this one and say that the science on it is settled already. Probably for the best, as I've run out of goofy vehicle based "tests." Scraped the bottom of that barrel so hard I've broken through. Buncha bones on the other side... Concerning, but let's not dwell on that.

Not only is this patently Summah, but I can also see it entering into my annual rotation of games as something I can end the season on. That "trip back home" is just too perfect, and it is not something I am content with experiencing only once.

The best racing games, for me, have a vibe. This isn't an arcade vs sim racer thing, it is a VIBE thing. For instance, Forza Motorsport has no vibe, while Gran Turismo has a big vibe. Criterion's Need For Speed: Most Wanted is a total vibe-killer but the original 3DO Need For Speed? A total vibe. Crash Team Racing? No vibe. Konami Wai Wai Racers? Vibes for days. Do you see what I mean?

If you know, you know.

OutRun 2 is one of the most vibe-y racing games ever made. Is it even a racing game? What are you even racing against? Time? Just jump in a Ferrari, stick on Risky Ride and just go. Drift every corner. Slipstream behind a school bus doing 200 MPH. Master the art of gear-sliding. OutRun 2's lesson is a clear one - always move forward, choose whichever path you want and don't let anything stop you reaching the goal. You'll impress a blonde lass in the process.

"My days were changing;
Excitement I didn't expect!
I never knew riding with you could bring so much wonder
Everything a surprise: your beautiful machine never slows
Never stops, this was really neat
My life was turning real"

Remember the scene of the Simpsons where Milhouse is playing Bonestorm or something like that and the whole room is being blown away by the videogame? Some perceptive viewers will notice that fiction often lies, portraying impossible things like they were real. Obviously, the kid wasn’t playing Bonestorm, he was playing OutRun 2.

This is a game that goes way down when thinking about it coldly. The endings suck, the overall overflown of different cars, modes and variety of junk that no one wants sucks, and it even looks kind of ugly. And this is without comparing with the first OutRun!

So, very skeptical, I played the game again. Since the only version that I played was in the arcade and the ways of playing the game today seem to suck because preservation of videogames is a joke, I expected the game to be much worse than before. And after messing around with a horrible port of OutRun 2006 there it is, uglier and now with more crap because it is now a home release or something.

Then I go to the mode that seems more arcady without thinking too much and… forget about everything. As soon as the engine begins to sound you know that you cannot occupy your mind with the distractions that the game will even actively throw at you constantly, if you think you lose. Now, if in the first OutRun you needed to have a little of care with your speed to avoid ruining your run by crashing into a car or out of the road, the sequel (or whatever it is at this point) goes like “you see those cars in front? Go wreck them if you need to, don’t let anything turn your engine below from 5”.

I could bring up a never ending list of why humans are the most stupid living creatures in the universe. Fortunately, not all reasons are bad. Somehow, when we see that cars lose their direction when they make a hard turn at great speeds, instead of being in absolute terror of the chaotic consequences of these machines we go and find a way to make that cool. Seeing a car at 300 km/h while turned on its side makes us go back to the most idiots of monkeys, enthusiastic for a few minutes to the point that we start sweating while sitting down. A car destroying physics and pushing away its obstacles like they were made of paper. Is it possible for the fakest of the cars to just go drifting and make you shake your body every single time? The reason says no, reality says otherwise.

Outrun Coast 2 Coast feels like summer. The music, the colours, the carefree attitude and the journey, passing through sunlit jungles, neon cities and peaceful villages. It all just feels uniquely summery and joyful. Its bliss.

As for the actual game fully, its also pretty good. Sumo Digital know their arcade racers and this is no exception thanks to pinpoint drift mechanics, fair but difficult level design and an absolutely addictive heart-mode where you rush to complete a variety of driving based objectives.

The sheer amount of content here as well cannot be understated. From having two distinct set of tracks, multiple things to unlock and two large extra modes based around vs racing and said heart-attack mode, theres just a LOT to do and see and it all feels so fulfilling. Weirdly I feel the best way to play this is on the PSP. Sure theres a slight downgrade in graphics but the pick-up and play nature of Outrun is perfect for short bursts on handheld.

Now. I wanna go far away!

zooms

sega racers are the perfect combination of arcade-style racing with bouncy, momentum-based physics; basically the fun of driving a car without the boredom of really driving a car. outrun 2006 (and by extension, outrun 2) leans towards the arcade side without sacrificing a need for skill or, by extension, insanely tight powersliding. the feeling of hitting a tight turn pushing 300 mph and dropping gears into a perfect powerslide without losing significant speed feels so good, and pulling it off is far more approachable than most in this genre.

this ps2 version is not the best thanks to some frame drops, but I was playing on a tiny crt anyway so it still felt great, and god knows I'm not spending $180 on an xbox copy. thankfully the single-player content is pretty good with plenty of races, drift competitions, and fulfilling random tasks for your girlfriend, though unless you're a god at these kinds of games the final tier of challenges will surely make you want to quit immediately. between both the original and SP layouts you've got a solid ~30 tracks, and more if you have the (much cheaper) xbox copy of outrun 2. I still like to pull this one up while I'm listening to a podcast or sitting in zoom class just to run through arcade mode. cannot recommend enough

Outrun 2 begins like the impact of a meteor, face-first at ground-zero before the ashes scatter and you are left staring at a monstrous crater for all eternity.

A visit from an ice-cream van in the form of an arcade cabinet with the blissful precision of a steering wheel has become a sweaty marathon jog at home with an analog stick. A child and their dreamlike mania sanded down to an algorithm, trapped in a straitjacket inside a red room with a black and yellow logo on the ceiling.
It is a daylong rerun of a reasonably solid sitcom playing on the TV at your nice grandma’s house, because what else is there to do?

Outrun 2 is a drunk friend at a party who's lost in the sauce and keeps rambling to everyone about their awesome big ideas they'd do if only someone gave them the money.
Maybe if Outrun 2 (3) got that money, it'd manage to get the child out of that room.

Install instructions at the end of this review...

The sequel to Outrun vastly improves upon the original game by adding a handful of empowering mechanics, and adding layers to the original vision. This can be annoying in bad games, but Yu Suzuki and team made something sparkling and beautiful here.

Outrun 2 gives you five gears to work up through. You'll rarely want to use anything but the last two. The speedometer is drawn in the right-hand corner, and every car has a different optimal place to upshift. When the space behind the needle is white, you're in a good place with your gear and speed. The starter cars have yellow spots on the speedometer that signal you should upshift, which are missing from the faster cars; you just have to time it so you upshift before your needle spills over to the red. I'm not sure if there's any mechanical bonus for upshifting while in the optimal spot, but even without that this feature brings the satisfying timing rhythm of the reloading mini-game from Gears of War.

The trick of the original Outrun is downshifting into corners so you can maintain control of the car, otherwise you will slide too far on either side off the road and into obstacles. When you downshift on the corners here, your car slides into a the most satisfying drift ever made. To me it feels somewhere between the Mario Kart 8 drift and the manual mini-game in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. You have to lean your analog stick left or right into the drift, and time it just right when you come out of a drift to straighten your car—you also need to remember to upshift back into a higher gear to maintain your speed. Downshifting while turning isn't the only way to enter a drift—you can use your brake too—but it's the way that felt the most natural and optimal to me.

Drafting is as important as drifting. I smiled like a baby when I drove behind another car and not only got a slipstream effect, but a big SLIPSTREAM title in the middle of my screen like a trick from Tony Hawk Pro Skater, and when my Dino 246 GTS zoomed quickly behind the other car, sling-shotting around a DeVille with ease, it felt amazing. Unlike other arcade racers, there aren't dedicated boost spots on the road or nitrous you can kick off: the other cars on the road are your speed boosts. I've never played another game where the slipstream effect, a real-life racing technique, is this useful (or fun to use). There is also some risk-reward to this mechanic. Since you're going so fast, it's easy to smack into the back of the car that's pulling you forward. This isn't an unrecoverable moment in a race, so long as it happens early enough, and it doesn't mean you won't reach the goal in time in Outrun mode—you're afforded a few mistakes, but you will cut it close if you're not fast. Besides killing the momentum, what it does do is push the car you hit in front of you. There is no pit maneuver or side-swipe mechanic to take out the competition—if you hit the car in front of you, you are giving it a boost of their own. It's a beautiful solution to enforcing race etiquette afforded purely by its arcade style.

The slipstream effect is helpful in the rote races to speed around your rivals, but it is delightful in the Outrun mode, which is where you should be spending most of your time. You aren't racing other drivers through the five (or fifteen) locations; you're just trying to get to the end before the timer ticks down. And since you're in a hurry, of course there's traffic. But the traffic is an opportunity to get ahead of it and impress your girlfriend. While you're weaving through it like the most annoying 24 year old on the highway, your girlfriend asks, in a voice that's sweet yet coy, "How far are you going to take me?" The driving in Outrun 2006: Coast 2 Coast feels so visceral and satisfying, so good, that it's impossible to deny its sensual effect. I can't remember the last time I fell harder in love with a game than this recent tryst with Outrun 2006: Coast 2 Coast. I've played it every day since I started playing it; I only want to play more of it.

There are certain games I like to have on every PC I use, and this has quickly become one of those. I've written install instructions below, in case I forget.

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Download Outrun 2006: Coast 2 Coast for PC from MyAbandonware dot com; use the MagiPack repack, which comes with the FXT mod pre-installed. After installing the MagiPack repack, navigate to the folder you installed it on your hard drive and run the FXTConfig.exe executable as admin. If you are installing this on a PC that hasn't had many games installed on it, you will need to install the Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015 x86 version. In the FXT mod settings, turn off XInput, or rumble might not work. After opening the game and saving your license, open up the license settings, set your name to ENTIRETY, then back out without saving to unlock all cars and tracks.

I purchased Gear.Club Unlimited on the Nintendo Switch at the weekend. It was definitely worth the 89 gold points I spent to get it, although something about its structure feels very mobile game. I've been on bit of racing thing recently and playing it made me realise something I normally say in jest but genuinely mean this time around. They don't make them like they used to.

OutRun C2C is a game I've wanted for years but I just never got round to it. A couple of months ago I finally bit the bullet and bought it off eBay. I'm absolutely glad I did because it turns out it's one of the most exhilarating racing games I've ever played, and goes to further prove, the genre peaked with the PS2. Yes, there's a lot of very good racing games on contemporary systems, but nothing can compare to the sheer fun and arcade style on offer here (see also Ridge Racer V).

From the fantastic visuals, excellent track design and awesome music arrangement, this game is just 100% fun. Incorporating the original aspects of OutRun, as well as building on the game modes, play style and overall presentation. It's not hyperbole when it's said this is one of the best arcade racing games ever made. This is sheer joy on a disc.

I almost marked it down for the game making you have the psp version to unlock everything that's on offer, but I can't be mad when it's already this good before you get to in game unlockable items. And heck, I'm tempted to buy a psp with this on it anyway, just to get even more of a fix. If only I didn't sell mine 15 years ago. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast has the kind of overly exuberant and sun-soaked design that makes me more than willing to put up with its kind of clunky physics and intense grind because it is so beautiful to look at. When on the highway, the next stage's background elements grow out of the ground as the sky morphs into new colors. The stage variety is vast with each stage having specific corners meant to test the driver and visual language that spans from casinos to the Milky Way. This game came out when manufacturer-specific racing games were still popular, but this officially licensed, all-Ferrari lineup puts all of those games to shame by featuring the then fresh models while also going all the way back classics like the Testarossa and even further with the 250 GTO. It captures the free-spirited dream of the Cannonball Run, a cross-country race featuring fast and stunning vistas the same way the 1986 arcade game did while modernizing it for a Y2K audience with a healthy does of Frutiger Aero. Much like how the original is an aesthetic time capsule of the 80s, Coast 2 Coast is a hydrating injection of optimism for the future. OutRun 2006 radiates glee in every part of the experience.

OutRun 2006 is my favorite racing game, but it's also more than that: it's a love-letter to the joy of driving itself, how it can be an escape from the dreary, humdrum reality that all of us find ourselves in from time-to-time. The arcade OutRun 2 was an instant vacation, and this is even more than that, with double the tracks and smart alternate modes that play with the core of the OutRun experience without abandoning it. The Heart Attack mode alone elevates what was already an excellent game into an absolute must-play. It's a shame that you can't buy it legally, but for those who are lucky enough to play it, this is as good as pure video games can get.