A playthrough of Virtual Xperience and Atari's 1995 arcade-style motorcycle racing game for the Atari Jaguar, Super Burnout.
Played through the Championship mode using the Punisher bike. The Punisher becomes available after getting an A rank in the Championship mode.
This video was recorded from an original Atari Jaguar console through a Framemeister upscaler by an XCapture-1 card. Be sure to watch it at 720p 60fps!
Super Burnout is an extraordinarily impressive game, and to qualify it by saying, "For a Jaguar game," would be an huge disservice. No matter the hardware, this was a technical triumph in 1995 - it truly give us a rare glimpse at just how much untapped power the Jaguar had under its hood.
The game itself is extremely similar to arcade games like Super Hang On and Riding Hero. Super Burnout is a simple motorcycle circuit-racing game, and it uses the super-scalar style graphics pioneered by Sega in the mid/late 80s to render simulated-3D graphics. The tracks are pretty varied - some lend themselves to flat-out speed, while others focus much more on tight, technical curves and turns.
The real difference that puts Super Burnout waaaaaay ahead of the pack is the speed and the detail on display. It runs at a locked 60fps at throws around up to 1,000 sprites on-screen at once. Notice how densely layered the sprites making up the scenery are, especially when compared to Super Hang On or Afterburner? That sprite count alone puts it somewhere between the Sega X and Y boards - wow. The framerate also makes the game control better than you'd ever imagine on a digital controller - there's no lag whatsoever, and (unlike Sega's home ports) it isn't twitchy-sensitive to the point where it's unplayable on a standard D-pad.
The music is excellent, and it's of surprisingly good quality considering it was all stored on a 2 megabyte cartridge. If I had to guess, I'd say it's using a mod-style format for its music like the Amiga was famous for.
And it supported two-player split screen! It still runs at 60fps and retains every bit of its speed in this mode, though playing in this mode does slightly reduce the draw-in distance. It doesn't really hurt the game at all, as it's still more than far enough out that you can see all the upcoming turns with no problem.
If only Atari had had more games like this, the Jaguar might have stood some sort of fighting chance at creating a niche for itself. It would've given it a way of distinguishing itself from the PlayStation - I highly doubt you'd ever see a 2D game running like this on Sony's platform! As you can see from the end credits, Super Burnout was created by a very small (but extraordinarily talented) French development team (Shen, who also did the Adidas Football PS1 games published by Psygnosis). Apparently, these guys only had weekend access to the publishers Jaguar development kit tools, and still managed to put the game together in about a year.
I would have loved to have seen this ported to the popular consoles at the time, but it was probably for the best that they didn't. It'd probably have to be cut back pretty dramatically to run as smoothly on anything but the PC.
In my mind, there's no question: Super Burnout is the best game that was ever produced for the Atari Jaguar. Its looks and sounds amazing, and it plays as good as it looks - it's a true arcade-quality racing game on a home console.
The only other motocycle racing game, regardless of system, that I like anywhere near this much is Hang On GP for the Saturn, and still, the Saturn title is a distant second. Damn, Atari - you guys were so good at undermining your own chances that nobody else even got the chance to compete with you.
And thanks Charlie Cat for the request. I've been meaning to do a video of this forever, and when you asked I finally felt motivated to enough to record it. I'm not very good at it i must admit, but I hope you enjoy the video!
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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1 сен 2017
