Daytona USA for the Sega Saturn is the "al dente rice" of video's game
bought this just to have ONE north american game to do the disc swap with, in order to flash my action replay with ps-kai. the 10 minutes of having my saturn removed from its case, listening for the slightest variations in motor speed from an already near-silent disc drive, just to possibly cause great harm to it by forcibly removing the disc from its spindle and smacking a taiyo yuden on that bitch as fast as possible, about a total of 50 times until it worked, was a far more intense experience than playing daytona usa on the sega saturn.
like the edible grain, rice, and unlike dry (not fresh) pasta, daytona usa is just unpleasant and hard to palette when just a bit undercooked. when i come across a few "al dente" grains of rice, i certainly notice it, but just accept the mistake and move on with my day.
unfortunate that this was, for quite some time, the console port most accurate to the model 2 version regarding physics and vehicle handling because it's crispily undercooked, at a fairly miserable framerate for something that's supposed to be going at most 335ish km/h. if you're trying to genuinely play The Racing Game of all time, hop up on PS3/360 ports or the (unfortunately closed-source but works well in wine) model 2 emu, which has sensitive steering input on a ds4 pretending to be xinput but is certainly doable, feels better than the NA release of daytona usa 2001 on dreamcast. having the 4 face buttons to shift to each individual gear is absolutely vital for playing this game on a controller, and you won't get that here.
which leads me to having to divulge that i typically enjoy playing amusement vision's daytona usa 2001 on dreamcast over this, despite the just infuriatingly twitchy controls on every version of DUSA'01. the "apology" version for the saturn, daytona usa championship edition, just does not feel quite right, and no increase in framerate can make up for that. the mildy tragic, messy yet faithful saturn port of the perfect arcade racing game is sign of the times, and in the case of sega's console division circa '94-'02, that was a time when they were not doing so hot, yet somehow continued to prevail and even flourish!
bought this just to have ONE north american game to do the disc swap with, in order to flash my action replay with ps-kai. the 10 minutes of having my saturn removed from its case, listening for the slightest variations in motor speed from an already near-silent disc drive, just to possibly cause great harm to it by forcibly removing the disc from its spindle and smacking a taiyo yuden on that bitch as fast as possible, about a total of 50 times until it worked, was a far more intense experience than playing daytona usa on the sega saturn.
like the edible grain, rice, and unlike dry (not fresh) pasta, daytona usa is just unpleasant and hard to palette when just a bit undercooked. when i come across a few "al dente" grains of rice, i certainly notice it, but just accept the mistake and move on with my day.
unfortunate that this was, for quite some time, the console port most accurate to the model 2 version regarding physics and vehicle handling because it's crispily undercooked, at a fairly miserable framerate for something that's supposed to be going at most 335ish km/h. if you're trying to genuinely play The Racing Game of all time, hop up on PS3/360 ports or the (unfortunately closed-source but works well in wine) model 2 emu, which has sensitive steering input on a ds4 pretending to be xinput but is certainly doable, feels better than the NA release of daytona usa 2001 on dreamcast. having the 4 face buttons to shift to each individual gear is absolutely vital for playing this game on a controller, and you won't get that here.
which leads me to having to divulge that i typically enjoy playing amusement vision's daytona usa 2001 on dreamcast over this, despite the just infuriatingly twitchy controls on every version of DUSA'01. the "apology" version for the saturn, daytona usa championship edition, just does not feel quite right, and no increase in framerate can make up for that. the mildy tragic, messy yet faithful saturn port of the perfect arcade racing game is sign of the times, and in the case of sega's console division circa '94-'02, that was a time when they were not doing so hot, yet somehow continued to prevail and even flourish!