It is my considered, though humble, opinion that Outrun 2 is “fucking brilliant”. While I doubt Sega would consider using that quote in its advertising, it comes from the heart. Or rather the gut, because that is where I feel the pull of this game and it has made me love my Xbox for the first time since Halo. You can stuff your Burnout 3 auto-erotica or your Need for Speed Astra Edition spoiler fetishism. Give me a Ferrari, absolutely zero customization, and the open road. 

Many of Outrun 2's reviews have employed a politer line of praise, before pointing out that the game is a tad on the short side. Despite the introduction of those evil missions they have a point.  Modern franchises offer careers and stuff. You know, lots of realistic time consuming guff. With Outrun it's all love hearts and swiftly altering landscapes. But the game's got heritage. So for that matter does Gradius V. Playing either of these two nuggets is not to step back in time exactly, they're more a sample of the refinement in a well liked vintage. And for me, 31 years young, memories of early gaming years fading with the hairline, it is the thrilling realisation of what I thought was an impossible dream in my youth: an arcade system in the home.

Look, it's great, you can powerslide all the way to that city over there.

My childhood was spent in the company of a ZX Spectrum and a host of memorable titles. The “humble speccy”, as time has now rendered it, was not undeserving of that epithet. Yet I retained the absurd hope that it could bridge the technological gap to the arcade emporium by utilising its hitherto untapped potential. Year after year I scrutinized the screenshots in Your Sinclair and Crash, praying that Ocean or US Gold had discovered programming alchemy. Sometimes they got close  and in Wec Le Mans, Chase HQ, Rainbow Islands, and R-Type, those programmers got far closer than was ever previously expected. But par for the course was the pale imitation, like Afterburner, Dragon Breed, Final Fight, and of course Outrun. They generally looked good frozen on the page, but once they started moving no amount of suspension of disbelief would suffice. The moral of the arcade conversion story was that if you wanted to play the best, you had to head to the arcades and pay for it.

I was fortunate to have grown up within easy reach of the Isle of Thanet, Kent's enclave of tacky seaside resorts which included Margate. The arcades along the front were mined most assiduously by my friend Gary and I during weekend afternoons whilst his mum was at Bingo. My modus operandi was to launch a recon the length of the neon strip, assessing where best to spend my money. No point wasting 20p on Double Dragon in Fantasy Zone when it was available for 10p in Dreamworld. Such preliminaries also served to extend the lifespan of a budget (usually a fiver) that my meagre playing skills could not.  It was in these crusty crucibles that my gaming tastes were fired: a predilection for scrolling beat em ups, racing games and Gryzor-style shooters. I was drawn to cabinets with flash yoke controllers like Star Wars, Afterburner, and, erm, Firefox. For minutes at a time (I told you I was rubbish) the game is yours to own. And then it ends, and the attract screen stares out like the glazed-over eyes of a woman no longer interested in you. The bitter truth was that the thrill of the arcade affair was fleeting – it could be had for so long, but then it was time to go home to the faithful, far less good looking, home computer.

Where are those arcades now, though? Eh? Eh? Bah!

This two-tiered structure to gaming was seemingly immutable. The dream was to somehow cheat it, and magic an arcade game into your bedroom. I was convinced that dream would come true when I enlisted parental help in a C&VG competition to win Thunderblade, the aim being to find as many words contained within the name of the game. The knock at the door from the deliveryman never came.

Soon after, I transferred my faith to a new God.  The Konix Multisystem promised to bring arcade entertainment into the home,  control system and all. How I got drunk on the heady fumes! Please gaze on its loveliness now!

More! http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=2&c=1024

Sadly this was a first bitter taste of vapourware and I was left to see out the decade with decent ports of Narc, Midnight Resistance, and Forgotten Worlds. Without recourse to a PC Engine, Neo Geo, Megadrive or Super Nintendo, I headed for Salford University mired in 8-bit antiquity and prayed that Street Fighter 2 would make it out before the Speccy emitted its last wheezy breath. It was a time of wishful thinking rather than wish fulfillment, my memories defined as much by the games I could not play.

A graduate income brought with it a freedom to buy whatever console I wished for. Desperate for milk, I bought all the cows on the market. First it was Nintendo's 16-bit Street Fighting udder I suckled, and later I defected to Sony having clapped disbelieving eyes on Wipeout 2097 and Tekken 2. Periodically I was drawn into the pokey arcade emporium near Manchester Piccadilly train station, but that was often to get an early look at a future console release. And once the Dreamcast was released, well, that was pretty much that. Crazy Taxi and every Capcom brawler I could ever want.

Consoles had finally become the very thing I'd most wanted when I was a youngster, and I am still ambivalent as to whether or not that is a good thing. The sense of awe and wonder felt at first encountering a new arcade game, often as part of a crowd, has been replaced by something smaller scale, more sanitised and domesticated. Much like those cinema audiences who lurched out of their seats during the Lumiere brothers' early shows, pioneering arcade games could provoke a physical reaction, a delightful nausea, a real rush. But, but, but… But now I have Outrun 2 all to myself, game after game, freeplay after freeplay. And I absolutely fucking love it. Yes, the traffic is more wall paper and window dressing than genuinely interactive. But then you rise up over the crest of the hill on Cloudy Highland, and you see that long road stretching out to the horizon. And you actually can drive there. Fuck it, consoles can take you pretty much anywhere.

KENTISH, October 2004.

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