I played this only once with a friend for like 2 hours straight at a Dave and Busters in my childhood, but it made such an impression on me that imagery from the game has been a presumed hallucination in my nascent subconscious until NOW, when I finally bothered to do 2 minutes of research and discovered that it was, in fact, real!! Watched a full playthrough and was so moved and blown away, it's even more picturesque and dreamy than I remembered.

an outrageously beautiful phantasmagorical adventure threaded with some childlike fantasyscapes occasionally on par with like, Little Nemo or Laputa, which it clearly derives influence from. There's something compelling to me about the motif of mine-kart/handcar levels in games and the way they present these really expressive locational snapshots in this simple, kinetic way, like little memories you can only briefly glance at while focused on the reflexive task at hand. The arcade machine itself was so whimsical and striking, and I remember the feeling of strenuously bobbing the levers in alternation with your partner creating such a fun sense of exhilaration and synchrony. I also remember being fucking physically WRECKED after playing this and i'm sure my spinal cord would fully disintegrate if I miraculously found another machine to play it on today. This seems to have a lot of similarities with the Japan-only title PSX Love Love Truck (including referring to a handcar as a truck??) which i also need to seek out and play now!

update: did a little bit more digging and found out that a ton of the visual elements from this game are apparently repurposed assets from a shelved Thomas the Tank Engine title that SEGA was working on at the time? Wild!