Sega Ages: OutRun (Saturn) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
173A playthrough of Sega's 1996 arcade racing game port for the Sega Saturn, OutRun.
I played five games back to back to show each of the tracks in the game. Unlike the Genesis version, there is no special ending for completing the game five times in a row - the credit sequence shows after each race.
Beginning with the Saturn, Sega began the long-running Sega Ages line of games. This line was often used to leverage the power of more powerful gaming consoles to provide accurate homeports of their classic games from yesteryear. The Saturn hardware was quite a powerhouse, well suited for playing the faux-3D, sprite-scaling games that Sega was producing in the late 80s as one of the first home consoles that could accurately replicate the original experience.
With OutRun, however, apparently "arcade perfect" wasn't good enough for developer Ruturbo. You can play the game exactly as it played in the arcade, of course, or you could input a quick code to then select "smooth" mode from the option menu. With this option enabled, the game throws the arcade game's 30fps framelimiter out the window and instead elects to run it at a silky smooth, rock solid 60fps. It's quite a thing of beauty to watch, and it's a dramatic upgrade to an already very good looking game. The analog controls also made for a far better experience than the digital controls that had been used in every OutRun port up to this point.
To say that it is better than the Genesis and TurboGrafx versions would be an absurd understatement.
The Saturn version marked the first time that the game ever ran at 60fps, and oddly enough, despite being ported to far newer platforms (including the PS3 and X360), it remained the only version that ran the game at 60fps until the 3DS version came out in 2015. The recently released Switch version also can be played at 60fps.
It makes a world of difference and it makes it difficult to go back to the original after playing it like this. If you're a fan of OutRun, you owe it to yourself to experience it in all of its 32-bit glory.
Side note: I recorded this video from the Japanese version of the game. It is identical to the US version that shipped on the Sega Ages compilation disc in every way but for the soundtrack. The US version is missing the remixed tracks thanks to the limited disc space (two other games came on the CD with it). Since I really liked the remixed tracks, I went ahead and used the original Japanese disc.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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