Despite being most well known in the West for their home consoles Sega has always been first and foremost an Arcade company. The good news is that their coin-op releases are among some of the very best quarter munching cabinets of all time. They were so renowned in the arcades that Sega banked their future in the console market on ports of these titles when they launched the 32-bit Saturn. This tactic worked well in Japan, but arcades had lost most of their luster throughout the rest of the world. This is a big reason why the Sega Saturn failed in the marketplace. The game I’m going to be taking a look at today is one of the company’s arcade ports to the system. It’s also one of the many that was never released outside of Japan. Enter Gale Racer. Let’s take a look!
Believe it or not there’s an actual story attached to this racing title. Through an opening text scroll we’re told the tale of a man ‘who was the personification of speed itself!’ This guy is known as the Gale Racer, and that person is actually you. The game begins as he enters a race to set the record straight because a bunch of posers are trying to claim the title. And with that you’re off on a race across the United States. The only rule is that there are no rules. Well, that’s not exactly true but we’ll get to that in a bit. Gale Racer is not a traditional racing game. Instead it’s more like Outrun. Your goal is to drive across various stages based on real life locations. You aren’t directly competing against anyone, rather, just trying to get across the finish line before the clock runs out.
Gale Racer is unique in that you view the action from your driver’s eyes behind the windshield. You cannot change your perspective at all. If this is something you can’t handle then it’s best to move along. With that out of the way let’s get to the gameplay. In Gale Racer your goal is only to make it to the end of each track within the time limit. Should this run out you immediately stop applying gas to the car but can still roll to the end if you’re lucky enough. The courses are linear but some have branching paths which allow you to skip specific stages. It’s neat, and the shortcuts are easy enough to find but still rewarding.
While you aren’t really competing with other foes that doesn’t mean the road isn’t filled with other vehicles. The problem is they take up far too much real estate on-screen. You’ll find they’re darn near impossible to dodge when you’ve got the pedal to the metal. It’s clunky design because it’s not a question of if, rather than when, you’re going to collide with the other drivers. The trick is in mitigating this by ramming into them in specific places. Smacking into them from behind can bring you to a halt which slows you down a great deal. Head on usually causes a roll over which puts you out of the race for quite a while. The key is to sideswipe foes whenever you can. In some cases it feels like you aren’t even slowed down.
Other cars (and trucks for that matter) aren’t the only thing you’ve got to deal with on the road here. Gale Racer features it’s fair share of environmental hazards. This is where things get a little weird though. For one thing, some of the stages feature racing action at night time. This means you have to turn on your headlights in order to see. Thing is, you would expect Gale Racer to do it for you. Instead you have to push the button yourself as you’re prompted to do so. I’m not sure why AM3 decided not to make this an automatic feature, but here we are. The same thing goes for when it’s raining. You have to manually turn on the windshield wipers. I’ve never played a driving game wherein I thought “it would sure be neat if the game made me turn on the windshield wipers myself.”
Along with these two scenarios you have a few other hazards on the mean streets of Gale Racer. In some areas you have sloped roads. These are tough to manage during turns in the road. Honestly the graphical effect is questionable, and I actually had a hard time even telling what it was supposed to be at first. In addition you’ll find a few rare cases where there’s no guard rail on the left side of the road while managing mountain passes. This means you can, and probably will, drive off the cliff. In these instances the game treats your car like you wrecked it, and you’re simply thrown back into the fray within a few moments. In later areas you’re even chased down by the police who continuously try to ram into your ride. There’s a fair amount of diversity in some of the tracks here.
If I’m honest, I can’t imagine paying full price for Gale Racer. It has multiple difficulty modes and all, but the content is pretty barebones. While there are a lot of different courses I was surprised at how short all of these are. Seriously, all tracks can be completed easily in less than a minute. That’s barely enough time to sink your teeth in. The large number of levels doesn’t mean much when you’re going to spend only a few moments in each of them. Furthermore, they just aren’t different enough to carve out any kind of identity. The developers didn’t know much about any of the locations they based these courses on. Seriously, who actually believes you drive over the Great Salt Lake to get to Salt Lake City? It just seems funny to me.
Gale Racer is also not a very pretty game. This is an arcade game from the early 90s after all, and the Sega Saturn was the first home console the house of Sonic put out that was powerful enough to handle it. Unfortunately it looks dated even when compared to games released at the time. The backgrounds and dash of your car are entirely sprite based. This means the animation is handled entirely via scrolling. Unfortunately this doesn’t run as you would expect on 32-bit hardware. The enemy vehicles have been upgraded however and are now rendered with polygons. They look boxy and unimpressive however, and these are hardly impressive. The best part of the graphics is the Sonic keychain that swings back and forth at the top of the screen. Gale Racer has a decent, but not amazing soundtrack. I do like that you can choose your music.
