11/21/2024:

   I’m finally starting to understand the Sega Saturn, and it’s rising up my personal console rankings list the more I learn and play around with its games.

I started messing around with High Velocity Mountain Racing Challenge after watching a video about it and seeing how cool it looked. I also just finished watching Initial D for the first time last year, so that added to my interest and enjoyment of virtual mountain racing.

   The first thing that caught my attention are the sweet visuals. I really love the distant skyline, the sense of elevation and roller coaster-type feel to the racing, the little gas stations, pedestrians, and other accents along the roads are all real cool as well. And luckily the controls, drift and car handling are very functional. Surprisingly so. I figured I’d play this just to look at it and enjoy the soundtrack, but it turned out to be a pretty fun racer, albeit somewhat still extra-punishing for the slightest miscues, in the way old games were.

   I’d say the funniest and most “old game” thing about this game is that there are two accelerate buttons, one if you want to accelerate with manual controls and the other if you want to accelerate with auto controls. And if you want to handbrake instead of regular brake, you have to hit the brake button + accelerate button, instead of mapping the handbrake to a different button altogether, despite the Saturn controller having plenty of buttons for all this.