Every console generation leaves behind a lengthy trail of over-looked gems. Titles that despite critical acclaim, and adoration from those who happen to sample its delights, simply get lost among the licensed movie tie-ins, and sporting franchises. Titles such as Vagrant Story on the original PlayStation, Panzer Dragoon Saga on the Saturn, and even ICO on the PS2 have been looked over by the vast gaming majority in the rush to purchase the best looking/longest/flashiest title available at the moment. Even the Xbox has had its fair share of ridiculously under promoted classics. Take for example, Sega’s sublime Outrun 2. Despite offering one of the best looking, and above all else, enjoyable racing titles available in many a year, people flatly refused to go out in their droves and pick up a copy. Hence, it rapidly drops in price, disappears from shop shelves, and is confined to history as yet another missed classic. Only Sega has refused to give up on us all. This time, the publisher is giving us multi-platform Outrun goodness in the guise of Outrun 2006: Coast to Coast. Instead of confining its delights to one particular console, this time it’s available on both PS2, and Xbox. And even makes an appearance on PSP.

Fans of the previous Xbox only Outrun 2 will no doubt be delighted to hear that changes to that core gameplay are minimal. The big addition over past titles is the introduction of slipstreaming. Slipstreaming, as most of you should really know if you’ve progressed past the age of 11, is the art of closing up behind a fellow racer, and tailing them in order to give you a short term boost of speed, enabling you to propel yourself off into the distance and back to the front of the pack. Diehards may very well assume this could very easily cripple that old gameplay, but it’s been implemented in such a delicate manner, and by developers who obviously love the game as much as it’s fans, that it immediately feels a mechanic of the gameplay that’s been there all the time.

Whether or not it’s been automatically assumed that the relatively high difficulty level of the previous Outrun outing turned off many a punter (in all honesty, if you’re an Outrun virgin you may need some time to get up to speed with the basics) this time around things are a touch easier on your fingers. If you happen to miss-time a turn, you thankfully won’t find yourself slowed to a crawl without a hope of meeting the time requirements to progress past the next checkpoint as this time the immediate slow down to your speed isn’t quite as severe. Again, it’s another addition that may grate with some of the hardcore die hard fans who after mastering the last title may find this one a breeze, but it certainly doesn’t feel out of place. Instead, it gives all of us that extra touch of leeway to tweak our own gameplay styles to our suiting. Instead of having to learn the perfect routes and timing, we’ve the opportunity to stamp our own authority.

This iteration of the long running series can be ultimately summed up as both the Outrun 2, and Outrun 2 SP arcade games served up on one disc. You’re more than able to simply progress through each version of the arcade game; power sliding your way along courses in that unique Outrun fashion, for weeks on end without tiring of what is a quite sublime gaming experience. But instead, there’s an absolute bucket-load of challenges and mini-games thrown into the mixture. Impressing your girlfriend as she demands and achieving those AAA ratings in each challenge will prove difficult enough in itself, but when these demands are so incredibly varied and outlandish (from the boring pass as many cars as possible, through to avoiding alien abduction) that you’ll be hooked for an age. Outrun 2006 has even managed to achieve that perfect balance between challenge and achievability, giving you that urge to push your rating up to that top AAA rating every few minutes spare that you happen to possess. Never will you feel that the game’s made achieving those top goals too difficult. You’ll always be well aware that just a touch of practice is all that’s required.

But despite that being enough to hook the majority, Sumo has seen fit to chuck in an incredible number of unlockables to spend your miles on. Anything from new Ferraris to those old classic Outrun tunes are there to be gorged on as soon as you’ve racked up a meagre few hours of play. As much hated as these unlockables usually are, here it just seems to work. The rewards are in a great enough number, and they’re all ultimately well worth the time required to achieve the number of miles needed to unlock them. Titles like Outrun 2006 don’t appear too often. After a game was ridiculously overlooked, it’s rare that we get a second chance to make things right. Therefore it’s with a delightful little spring in my step that I whole-heartedly encourage all and sundry to get down to their local gaming emporium and make Outrun 2006 your next purchase as soon as humanly possible. Not only will you be giving yourself the chance to sample some of the best driving title delights in recent memory, but you’ll be encouraging all those other publishers and developers to keep on tweaking those much-loved, but ridiculously over-looked classics and offer up more of the same. You owe it to the gaming world as a whole to splash your cash. To coin a phrase, “just do it.” This review comes courtesy of our friends at Boomtown.net.