Sega Touring Car Championship (Saturn) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
348A playthrough of Sega's 1997 arcade racing game for the Sega Saturn, Sega Touring Car Championship.
Played through the championship in the "Saturn side" mode on the normal difficulty level using the Toyota Supra, MT.
Sega Touring Car Championship has really been dragged through the mud over the years in the west - far more so than just about any other Sega arcade racer from the 90s - and it has largely been due to how absurdly difficult and twitchy the game seems when you are first learning it. But have no fear, if you spend the time, you will find one of Sega's best arcade racers buried deep beneath the surface. It just takes a while to find it, that's all.
SCTT was headed up by Tetsuya Mizuguchi, who you might recognize as the the design lead for Sega Rally, Space Channel 5, and Rez. The game posed a pretty radical change from the Sega Rally or Daytona USA formulas - the team reportedly spent a ton of time researching and driving these cars in order to produce the most "realistic" modelling of car physics possible in a video game.
In succeeding in that aim, they alienated a lot of people. When people go to the arcade, they want a game that they can jump into, figure out in a minute or two, and go. STCC is not a game that can be played like that. Your first several races are likely to end with you swerving back and forth into every single obstacle on the track - the controls actually reflect real driving.
They are incredibly sensitive, and this is what throws a lot of people off - but it is also why the settings menu allows you to calibrate the range and deadzone for your analog steering, accelerating, and braking controls. It helps to avoid the extreme over-sensitivity they suffer from on the default settings. It'll take awhile before you are good enough to get the car going down the street in a straight line, but once you figure it out, it feels awesome. You have a lot of control at your disposal - it just takes a bit to figure out how to use it to line up corners and nail hairy turns.
STCC was one of the last racing games before the console gave up the ghost in America, and I'm certainly glad that it made the cut. The graphics are quite good to look at (though they of course pale in comparison to the arcade's, which was phenomenal even for the Model 2 hardware) - they're roughly on par with Sega Rally, though they run at a higher resolution and a lower frame-rate than that game did. The frame rate remains even and never gets in the way, but it never feels much smoother than the original Daytona USA Saturn port which is a bit of a let down. The texture mapping usually looks good, though, especially on your own car. The benefit of the compromises that the game makes in visual quality really only become apparent when you are holding the controller, though. This game is FAST. Not because of what the speedometer says, but because it feels like you're really tearing around at ridiculous speeds with the scenery blurring around you. You don't tend to notice that the glass textures and chainlink fence are made up of checkerboard patterns when your sweating how to take a 50 degree turn at 175mph.
The sound is a typical Sega class act here, as well. You don't get any announcers screaming, "Long easy right!" at you - the game moves too fast for direction like that to be of any use - but you do get an absolutely fantastic eurobeat soundtrack (yup, just like Initial D), and I really liked the HUD and menu graphics. The whole thing looked well put together.
And finally, you might be loathe to try it because there is so little content. The game only a has five tracks, and a lap on any of them is only about 30 seconds long. But remember how Daytona's three tracks were always enough? Same thing here. You really have to learn these tracks thoroughly to play well, and if you get into it, it's easy to find yourself spending hours working on a single turn. Five courses is more than enough unless you want to go completely insane.
If you like Sega's 90s racers, I'd urge you to give this one a chance. Despite the enormous learning curve, there is a ton of depth and fun to be found here. You will suck at it at the beginning. A lot. But as you gradually learn the courses and the feel of each car on the road, things do gradually become easier. The payoff is totally worth the effort - once you have it down, there are few experiences on the Saturn that are this exciting, this fast, and this satisfying.
One word to the wise: don't even attempt to play it with a digital pad. It's virtually unplayable without analog controls.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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