Outrun 2 came out today!

Yep, I played it today at the arcades and I really had a lot of fun.

The game is really beautiful. You have the choice between 8 ferraris, 2 novice, 4 intermediate and 2 advanced. The difficulty is well thought out, novice cars handle easily and rarely drift while the advanced cars require skill to be handled correctly.
After choosing your car you select either automatic or manual transmission. And after that the play mode and finally the music you want to listen to.

They kept the courses like the old outrun versions, at the end of every stage you can either go left or right.
Left is easier and right is harder, they kept it simple and that's good.

When you finish the game, losing or completing it, you see the course you followed in the old outrun style of the map and the small car following your chosen course.

There are 3 play modes in single play. Outrun mode is the classic one where you have to race and cross the checkpoint before the time is over.
Heart Attack mode is really fun. You basically have to do what your girlfriend asks you to do everytime during the game. The better you do the better grades you get everytime and the more hearts you get. Things she asks you include: overrun the cars in front of you, do a power drift or stay on a certain line of the road. Each request has to be done in a defined space, you get the requets, then see in front of you a point where the word start is floating and after a distance another point with end. So if you drift from start to finish without any pause and without crashing you get the AAA grade and a little animated emoticons with hearts all over ^_^. Every crash or accident makes you lose more or less heart points depending on how bad you perform, e.g going out of the road just makes you lose a few points but a huge crash on the sideways that sends you flying makes you lose a lot.

The third mode is time attack, there are no cars in the circuit. The only ones that you can see are 'ghosts' of cars. So I believe the first 'ghost' shows you how to do the best time.

The 2 players mode is simply a race.

I really enjoyed playing this game. There are a lot of small details that made me smile. Like for exemple, the animations of the driver and the girlfriend. When yoiu drift she raises her hand and screams, she blows kisses to cars you overrun,etc.
The heart attack mode is really fun to play! You get to see small animated emoticons when you get graded after each request that are really funny looking ^_^
I personnally well performed when asked to drift, but kept bumping into cars when I had to overrun them /versus/images/graemlins/crazy.gif
I don't play racing game that often, but this came really hooked me ^_^

 

Look forward to playing this when im over in Tokyo soon.