Daytona USA Review

This is it. The pinnacle of arcade racing games, from an era when the flickering monitors at the local bowling alley transported you to a world that simply wasn't possible on the 16-bit home hardware of the time.

Huge, sweeping circuits were laid out in colourful polygonal 3D and cheese-laced Japanese soft rock rang out over the bleeping of less sophisticated cabinets. For a certain generation of racing fans, the twists and turns of Daytona USA's three circuits are permanently imprinted on the hippocampus, but that generation was robbed of a decent port of the game for home systems.

The Saturn and PC versions were horribly compromised and the Dreamcast one bore little relation to the game at all. There's never been an absolutely faithful conversion of Daytona USA, and with the release of this XBLA version there still hasn't. This is better.

At its core, this is the arcade game, but this XBLA version has been lavished with attention befitting Daytona's stature. Naturally it's in HD; naturally the textures have been smoothed so they look acceptable splashed across your HDTV; and naturally it's running at 60 frames per second, just like the arcade. What we weren't expecting, though, was for the scenery's tendency to pop into existence mere metres from your car to have been, in all but one or two cases, fixed as well.

The arcade never suffered as badly as the Saturn version, granted, but that makes it all the more impressive that Sega has sorted it regardless. Other treats in this version include Challenge, Time Trial and Survival modes, which serve to increase the longevity beyond mastering the three circuits - something that's far more difficult than it sounds anyway.

Our favourite addition, though, is the brilliantly insane Karaoke mode, which enables you to sing along to instrumental versions of the famous theme music. Less hilariously, but more usefully, there's support for eight players over Xbox Live to replicate the legendary showdowns that occurred at amusement arcades around the world in the mid-'90s.

An arcade classic and a reverential conversion mean that the definitive version of Daytona is finally available on XBLA. We can't wait to see which of Sega's spectacular arcade back catalogue will be next to receive the same attention. You know, Daytona USA 2 never got a proper home conversion either...

Daytona USA is out on 26th October for 800 MP.