Who wouldn’t like to be cruising the streets in a Ferrari with a gorgeous model next to them and the wind blowing through your hair? What if those streets were beachside vistas, snowy mountain ranges, ghost forests, cloudy highlands, or ancient Egypt complete with a giant pyramid and you were able to speed to your hearts content? Sound even better? Well SEGA have updated an arcade classic from the 1980’s and brought it over to Xbox. The only problem is, like those middle aged and elderly gentlemen that buy Ferraris to bolster their sex drives, things are over too quickly.

When the original Outrun hit arcades there was no doubting the enormous influence and impact it had. I remember queues of people waiting to chuck their money at Outrun and it was popular for an extremely long time. Outruns’ multiple paths, selectable music, female passenger and massive drifting action made it an arcade smash and it's no surprise that Outrun remains an icon of gaming from the 80’s at its most finest.

Sega initially released Outrun 2 in arcades, though I have never seen it in Australia, and being based on their Xbox based Chihiro board Sega promised an Xbox conversion and here it is! Fans of pure arcade, old school racing games will be in total heaven with Outrun 2. Those, however, that have moved on from the simple concept of the original and prefer a more cerebral or ‘sim’ style experience from their racers should basically steer clear as the whole Outrun 2 experience is pure, straight forward, beat the clock, arcade racing action.

It has to be said that Outrun 2 does almost nothing wrong. The graphics throughout the games 15 environments look fantastic, and in a few locations are simply amazing. Exiting the first stage, Palm Beach, and racing down the hill and around the first bend of Deep Lake looks incredible and Outrun 2 is filled with loads of awesome moments such as that. The car models feature loads of detail and while appearing simpler than say, PGR2, it’s more of a case of the lighting in the game creating this appearance than the actual detail or polygon count of the models and to top things off, the sensation of speed is great as well.

Even though there’s a 2 in the name of the game, it’s probably safest to look at Outrun 2 as more of a homage to the first game rather than a true sequel as while the engine driving it and the graphics are all brand new, there hasn’t really been anything new added to the arcade side of the game. While I’ve already mentioned that Outrun 2 is all about the ‘pure arcade’ experience the downside of this is that if you aren’t interested in any of the extra game modes, Outrun 2 is over in around 5 minutes as that’s all it takes to complete. No doubt this makes it one of the shortest games yet released for the Xbox.

Luckily AM2, in an effort to add more meat and longevity to the game, have added a number of new modes on top of the normal Outrun mode. Time Attack sees you simply racing for the best time and is the mode I found myself going back to over and over again to try and shave seconds off my times. Heart Attack mode sees you still following the multiple paths of the game but also following the instructions of your female companion. She will ask you to drive through coloured zones, drift at certain areas or simply pass as much traffic as possible and none of them are too taxing on the grey matter. Where the bulk of the games replay ability comes in though is the ‘Challenge mode’.

Spread out through 101 challenges, through the 15 stages of the game, Challenge mode throws a large variety of different and quirky tasks at you. These range from simple racing, steering between trucks, gaining hearts, breaking lasers between other cars, keeping your speed over a certain amount through to photography challenges and even a math mode! Who said games can’t be educational? There is definitely a large variety of tasks and more stages and challenges are unlocked as you progress. They start off quite simple but after a while get extremely challenging and to be honest, I wouldn’t really say that for the amount of time and effort that you need to put in, the rewards are worthwhile pursuing. One source of frustration I will mention is that the ‘Speed challenges’ require you to maintain a certain speed while drifting, yet to begin a drift the brake must be slightly tapped which lowers your speed. Also during drifting your speed can fluctuate and annoyingly, would drop under the speed limit that you need to complete the challenge.

Completing stages of the Challenge mode unlock special cards, more cars, more tracks to race on (some from Daytona and Scud Racer) and even more music tracks to listen to. The biggest problem is that there are only 8 cars in the game and the special cards content is sort of pointless as they mostly contain just pictures of Ferrari clothing, model cars and engines. Sure, there will be people out there that love this sort of thing and if you do, then Outrun 2 is definitely the game for you and the Challenge mode should keep you busy for months. For me though, the best fun was had mastering the drifting action in Time attack mode and trying to beat my race times. The Challenge mode didn’t really hold my interest but Time attack did and I still find myself going back to it quite frequently.

Outrun 2 features some great multiplayer action and another new option is ‘Party mode’. 4 players can take turns trying to complete a series of challenges with the goal being to beat the previous person. It’s fun, but why Sega thinks that including this and excluding traditional split screen racing is beyond me. If you have Xbox Live you can race online as the game supports 8 players and has quite a few good options available for those that choose to host sessions. I did notice a bit of lag but nothing terrible and when it occurred it didn’t detract from the race at all. It only seemed to be when playing with the maximum 8 players so perhaps stick to 4. There have been some issues online with the scoreboards not updating properly (though Sega’s racer isn’t the only one to have suffered from this) so hopefully this will be looked into and it has to be asked, where is the rear view mirror? I want to be able to see who is behind me!