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Super Burnout


louisg

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I'm always surprised that this game doesn't have more fans. I guess it was at odds with what was current at the time, seeing how people were getting more into true 3d racers like Daytona and Ridge Racer. But Super Burnout is just pure breakneck-paced arcade satisfaction, hauling butt at 60FPS with an awesome soundtrack thrown in and demanding lots of technique from the player. IMO it's one of the best things on the Jag. If only there were more games like it. What do you think of it, and what are some of your best times?

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There was another bike racing game that was around that time, I can't think of the name, but you could actually strike your opponents while you were along side of them. Nothing like a high speed fisticuffs right? Thiat might have been why the game is a bit forgotten. If only the jaguar could have stayed around a bit longer...

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I never played it, but I am interested in finding it someday, as it is a bit of an obscure title.

 

Other than Hang-On, I can't think of a straight motorcycle racer that was popular. 

So my guess is an obscure genre + an obscure system = more obscurity.

The No Swear Gamer on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChtJuo040EOCTVziObIgVcg

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These are some great points. Yeah, Road Rash was a huge deal! And as Phil pointed out maybe there just weren't many people willing to check out a straight-ahead motorcycle racer. And especially one that used oldschool graphics techniques. I remember being a teen and not being very interested in the arcade version of Outrunners because Daytona was out. But looking back, Outrunners is a fantastic game and could very well be the best of that series. I also remember a couple years later lamenting that all the racing games were slower lap-based games instead of freeway racers, owing partly to the novelty of being able to design a detailed track, and partly to the expense of polygons. I guess I have nobody but myself and people like me to blame ;)

 

I guess when I ask why it's not more popular, I'm more wondering why it's not a bigger deal among Jaguar fans! It's definitely something to show off. When I showed it to one skeptical friend this year, he went from being "Why the heck did you want a Jaguar" to "Wow, not even the Neo Geo could do this!"

 

I wonder what bike that reviewer who said it was too slow had picked. There are definitely some that feel more sluggish than others, and you need to use some strategy either way to avoid being overtaken. When you first start playing the game, you might think your bike is underpowered. But you just need to learn to work the tracks. That's the thing about Super Burnout as compared to Road Rash: Super Burnout is much more about learning the tracks, almost like a proper racing sim.

 

On the topic of Daytona for Saturn, I think there could've been a better conversion at launch. It was definitely rushed, though honestly, it keeps all the gameplay intact which is no small feat. I still prefer it at times over some of the later home ports because it feels so visceral. People like to say that Ridge Racer 1 was a lot better, but honestly, I find the complex physics of Daytona much more intriguing and worth putting up with the chuggy graphics. If Sega had really had all their ducks in a row for that North American Saturn launch I think videogame history might have been a bit different-- it went a bit more their way in Japan, though of course Sony still was the juggernaut over there. I've gotta say Sony did some really smart design decisions in a time where not many people understood 3d.

 

ANYWAY.. going back to the topic at hand, here's my best time for the America track. Somehow Super Burnout starts off with one of the hardest courses (shrug). 

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I like to be 100% honest with my posts :-)

 

As a Jaguar owner at the time even i was 'surprised' to see a sprite-based bike racer on the Jaguar, for pretty much the reason's stated in my earlier post.

Sega could of handled a lot of Saturn conversions far better (Daytona USA being prime example) but they were simply over-streched, Time Warner doing Virtu Racing, Manx TT and HOTD going to Auzzie developers etc etc. 

 

 

But this was at a time they were trying to support:MD, MCD, MS, Game Gear, 32X and Saturn!!!!

 

 

But even by time of Dreamcast you (sadly) still saw rushed releases (Sega Rally 2) and KEY games farmed out to others (VF3) just under watchful eye of SEGA.

 

 

With Saturn they found themselves in same boat as Atari with the Jaguar, suddenly that hardware you'd had in R+D to compete again'st 3DO/Atari/Sega/Nintendo, had a very rude awakening as the juggernaut that was Sony suddenly (it seemed) appeared from nowhere and with hardware and resources they could only dream of.

 

 

There simply was'nt time to start from scratch they had to react and try and stay in the fight and plan for generation after i guess.

 

Yeah, I think that's more or less right. Time Warner's Virtua Racing was a disaster, though I think Sega Rally 2's poor performance had a lot to do with it being a WinCE game. For how stretched thin Sega was, they sure did a lot of memorable and impressive games during that era-- It's almost on par with their Genesis output IMO (Crazy Taxi, Virtua Tennis, the easy-to-overlook Bass Fishing, Jet Grind Radio, HOTD2, Chu Chu Rocket, F355, Rez, Cosmic Smash, the list goes on). 

 

I don't think the issue with the Saturn is that the hardware is wimpy, it's that it was a mess. I think that resulted in it being hard to program for, plus the launch games were all nowhere near as good as the second gen Saturn releases. Imagine if they'd come out of the gate with Virtua Fighter 2 and Sega Rally! Oh yeah, also imagine they didn't burn developers and retailers with a surprise launch. And imagine they didn't burn customers by already not really sticking with the SegaCD or 32x ;)

 

Anyway, Saturn-power-wise, I remember even with Virtua Fighter Remix that I drooled a little since my 486 PC could only barely run FX Fighter at the time. All in all, I think it's pretty comparable to the PS1 (we forget how rough PS1 games from that same era are).

 

But I didn't feel the same way about the Jag TBQH. I remember seeing Cybermorph at a computer show and it wasn't much better than what a 386 could do. Same with T2k, even though it's a marvelous game design. Of course, the Jag was a fraction of the price, which in retrospect is kind of impressive.  I *did* like the port of Doom quite a bit at the time.

 

Yeah, people were past sprite-based racers. But Jag owners today should be stoked about Super Burnout! Now that Jag, Saturn and PS1 are all equally obsolete, it's a real gem in the Jag's library.

 

Re: Mega CD sprite scaling, it would've been nice to see more of it. Given that the processor is 10mhz and IIRC programmers could still access the 7mhz processor in the Genesis, you'd think it could do flat shaded polygons really well (like the X68k did with games like Geograph Seal). But people kept trying to texture everything-- all the 3d games are fairly choppy (Soulstar, Batman, etc). I also think the RAM was pretty limited for something like Power Drift. Look at those ports of Galaxy Force and Night Striker: Yikes! 

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Yeah, WinCE I think was to give devs more familiar with DX and such an edge. My impression judging from the quality of the Naomi kit games though is that it must've been quite a decent dev-kit. So much beautiful flawless 60fps stuff, even at launch. What I heard about Sega Rally 2 is that they'd promised to make one of their big early titles a WinCE game. I don't know if that is true or just a rumor.

 

When it comes to mid-90s 3d hardware, I really wonder if the idea was that you'd use the 3d for backgrounds (meshes and rooms) and use mostly sprites for people walking around and such. And honestly I wish that would've done that more because games of that era tended to be a pixel mess! I remember squinting at screenshots in magazines wondering "what the heck is this even supposed to be?". Anyway, if they used 3d for bg and sprites for fg more, quads would make sense in that context, but they're not great otherwise. I do appreciate less warping though.

 

One baffling thing about Saturn hardware was the lack of good translucent support. There's actually a great video on it that explains that .. let me try to remember .. that it could be only on the background/tile-warping VDP. The video has a lot of examples of how translucencies can erase the foreground and how they have to be used very carefully. But given that even the SNES did this decently, you'd think that more attention would've been paid to this capability. 

 

But the one most confusing thing about the Saturn is how they could be unprepared for 3d, if that is true, when Sega's arcade division was on the bleeding edge. You'd think they would've said, "Let's make something as close as possible for the budget to a Model 2". If they were looking at what was going on in the PC world they would've seen the 3d storm coming :/

 

BTW on the topic of Core: I remember really liking Thunderhawk. Soulstar is also not bad, though it tends to feel a bit clunky/choppy to me. One amazing thing about Soulstar is they pulled off 3d textured walls!

 

I agree on the Jag's appeal being a cheaper version of a PC. It really is astounding looking back that something that inexpensive could do what a $1200+ PC could. While the Amiga flopped in the United States, I do know a lot of people in Europe were using them through the mid-90s. That would make the Jag a lot more appealing. Over here, you didn't have much of a choice other than to jump to PC or Mac since you eventually weren't able to buy hardware/software easily. The reason our family made the jump was because a hard drive for our Amiga 500 cost almost as much as a whole PC! And games were getting too big for floppy. Comparing the Jag price-wise to other systems at the time made it impressive. The 3do was several hundred dollars, PCs were over 1k, but the Jag was only $250 or so? Not bad considering!

 

But the Jag's software library makes me sad. So much potential. People could've done some really great stuff with it.

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I wouldn't be too surprised if there had been a nearly perfect port of Scud Race; Virtual On: Oratorio Tangram was pretty much 1:1 with its Model 3 counterpart. 

 

I could see how people would think 3do would be the platform to beat seeing how expensive it was. Truthfully, when I saw PSX on display, the early games like Wipeout didn't seem like all that big of a leap past 3do (think about stuff like Need For Speed. They were still using that same engine on the PSX sequel!). It was maybe about like a Megadrive vs. PC Engine kind of difference. They were still affine uninterpolated textures, so it seemed more like a refinement of more of the same, at least until people really got a good grip on the hardware and started really doing interesting things (we forget how choppy so many old PSX games are and we tend to only remember the good stuff!). The price was a lot nicer, though! And with time PSX and Saturn certainly proved that they could surpass the 3do's performance with a hand tied behind their back. 

 

BTW have you seen the M2-based arcade boards that Konami put out? I think the M2 could've been a contender, but 3do called it quits before then. Someone I knew at 3do actually cited the entry of the N64 as the final straw (I guess like MS entering the console race contributed to the Dreamcast's demise).

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Hey guys! I was just reading this thread, my first read on the forum, since I saw Lost Dragon replying and I know him from other forums long gone or bereft of open minds. Please see my thread in "introduce yourself" to know who I am so I don't need to repeat.

 

Anyway, I am a big fan of Super Burnout, even back when it first came out, it blew away Hang-on and Sazuka 8-hours (I think that's what it was called) from the arcades! Yeah, I too, was one of the people that wanted 3D eye candy back then, and wanted Road Rash for the Jag and Need for Speed for the Jag, but I was still very impressed with pseudo-3D scaling sprites like Super Burnout too. It's one of my favorites, though I mastered it and lost interest for a few years due to that, but I waited long enough and started playing it again recently and am relearning it now and, so far, unsuccessfully attempting to get as good as I once was. (see my scores from yester-year here: http://www.angelfire.com/nv/jaguartop50/ - I am not under the name Bakerman on there of course, check my intro thread and you'll know who to look for...the guy right at the top on a couple, though I see I never listed times for all tracks and have moved down to 3rd or 4th on a few tracks.

 

As some were civilly attempting to discuss on AA, a version of Road Rash closer to the original Sega Megadrive/Genesis games would be really cool on the Jag using a 2D engine like Super Burnouts (even though I think the Jag could totally pull off a 3DO RR, but why settle for something around 20fps if we can have RR at 60fps?) 

"Slugs, he created slugs?...Is this not the work of a complete incompetent? I would have started with Lasers, 8 o'clock, day one."-Evil (Time Bandits)

"...burn the land and boil the sea, but you can't take the sky from me..."-theme song (Firefly)

"I try to respect him, I really, really do, but he's just such a Smeg-head."-Lister (about Rimmer, Red Dwarf)

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When the humble ST was doing 3D racers like these:

 
 
 
 
 
 
I think Super Burnout was sadly always going to be seen as yesterdays news on Jaguar.

 

Definitely two of my ST favorites, especially when I played them on the Mega STE at 16MHz! But none the less, still respectable at 8MHz speeds.

"Slugs, he created slugs?...Is this not the work of a complete incompetent? I would have started with Lasers, 8 o'clock, day one."-Evil (Time Bandits)

"...burn the land and boil the sea, but you can't take the sky from me..."-theme song (Firefly)

"I try to respect him, I really, really do, but he's just such a Smeg-head."-Lister (about Rimmer, Red Dwarf)

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When the humble ST was doing 3D racers like these:

 
 
 
 
 
 
I think Super Burnout was sadly always going to be seen as yesterdays news on Jaguar.

 

Well, NSP may be a wonderful polygon game, but Vroom! is still 99% scaling sprites like SB, though not nearly as colorful or fast...but I get your point. Though, back in the day, Next Gen Gamer mag had gloriuos reviews (from Takara) for SB and Val d' Isere skiing/boarding and was impressed with the smooth animation and 60fps on both, so not everyone thought it was yesterday's news, Takara said these games finally made the Jag look like a powerful system! NG was one of two mags (in the U.S.) that had reviewers that didn't axe the Jag for no good reason, the other, I think, was Videogames, or Video Gamer, or something like that, they even still gave the Jag and games high marks and good (or at least fair) reviews all the way up to when Atari was just about to go belly-up and the Saturn, PSX and N64 were out. Also all my college buddies and I thought it was awesome and one of them already had a Saturn import. Of course they and I weren't industry "experts." And none of us had Amiga's or ST's, just SNES's and Genesis' (Mega drives,MCD, 32x's), but we new good games when we saw and played them, and we were part of the mass, target audience!

"Slugs, he created slugs?...Is this not the work of a complete incompetent? I would have started with Lasers, 8 o'clock, day one."-Evil (Time Bandits)

"...burn the land and boil the sea, but you can't take the sky from me..."-theme song (Firefly)

"I try to respect him, I really, really do, but he's just such a Smeg-head."-Lister (about Rimmer, Red Dwarf)

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I can see why Super Burnout wouldn't be cutting edge in 1995, but I'd say that the massive amounts of large scaling sprites is not something you could do on the ST, Amiga, Genesis, or SNES, and neither is the textured road moving at a flawless 60fps. I love the Vroom/F1 games though, and No Second Prize is great too- I play both of those on my Amiga quite a bit (though I think Lotus 2 takes the cake for me :)). But something like Vroom is really an extension of the Lotus technique (although it's skillfully and artfully done) and NSP is just a bit better than early polygon games like Falcon.

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I don't know, i think most Jag fans rate SB in the top dozen at least, I do. just played it today as a matter of fact!

 


I can see why Super Burnout wouldn't be cutting edge in 1995, but I'd say that the massive amounts of large scaling sprites is not something you could do on the ST, Amiga, Genesis, or SNES, and neither is the textured road moving at a flawless 60fps. I love the Vroom/F1 games though, and No Second Prize is great too- I play both of those on my Amiga quite a bit (though I think Lotus 2 takes the cake for me :)). But something like Vroom is really an extension of the Lotus technique (although it's skillfully and artfully done) and NSP is just a bit better than early polygon games like Falcon.
everything in SB was 60fps, roadside sprites and all, not just the road.

"Slugs, he created slugs?...Is this not the work of a complete incompetent? I would have started with Lasers, 8 o'clock, day one."-Evil (Time Bandits)

"...burn the land and boil the sea, but you can't take the sky from me..."-theme song (Firefly)

"I try to respect him, I really, really do, but he's just such a Smeg-head."-Lister (about Rimmer, Red Dwarf)

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Just for balance, here's another review of the game, this time raving. I tried to find the glowing review from '95 by Takara (Diehard Gamefan, IIRC) but since I couldn't, here's a glowing substitute and one from 2013, not 1995: http://www.atarijaguar.co.uk/2013/10/super-burnout.html?m=0

 

Mind you, this guy is fair, even if it is a dedicated Jaguar site, if a game sucks, he says so, if a game is good, he says so.

"Slugs, he created slugs?...Is this not the work of a complete incompetent? I would have started with Lasers, 8 o'clock, day one."-Evil (Time Bandits)

"...burn the land and boil the sea, but you can't take the sky from me..."-theme song (Firefly)

"I try to respect him, I really, really do, but he's just such a Smeg-head."-Lister (about Rimmer, Red Dwarf)

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Super Burnout was a good game.  I had a friend come over to visit one day and when they saw it they immediately said "Hang On!!".  So I feel that Super Burnout was most likely left in the dark because of Sega's Hang-On game.  I had a blast with Super Burnout and the tracks are really good.  But I also felt that it could have been more.  So far my favorite racing game on the Jag is Power Drive Rally.  The system really needs a good racing game along the lines of Rad Racer, OutRun, or maybe its own Gran Turismo-style racing game.  

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