Sega Touring Car

[saturnworship]

what happened to SEGA in 1997? i hope someone can explain me, because i think is unconceivable what SEGA did to that game..

i tried to play it 10 minutes ago, and i can't have that game more than 10 minutes on the console,,,

why that popping? why that resol?? why those DANCING TEXTURES !!! why!

why SEGA RALLY is possible on a saturn and happened what happened to MANX TT and SEGA TOURING CAR in visual therms?

damn!

[rossi46]

It's funny looking back to the magazines at the time talking about Touring Car. Both SSM and Sega Power pimped the title to the max, saying it was going to be the Sega Rally beater we were all waiting for.

They must have been lied to over and over again by Sega.

[Anthaemia.]

SSM later apologised for "pimping" this game, explaining that developer CRI (of Galaxy Force II MD infamy) promised the final version would be much improved on preview code. Of course, this never happened, and as a result the SSM team stopped hyping many AM conversions they would otherwise have promoted to death before the Touring Car incident. Besides, if you think STC is bad I presume you've forgotten about The House Of The Dead - Sega really shouldn't have farmed its later 32-bit productions out to third parties, even if Tantalus did a good enough job with Manx TT!

[skyblueads]

Touring Car was a bitter dissapointment, it's such a shame it didn't get the full Rally treatment, I remember SSM being very apologetic when the final version received IIRC, 71%. It really did shake my faith in the later AM conversions.

[rossi46]

It was and still is, a real shame about STC. Did no-one ever spend long enough tinkering with the game settings and car set-ups to find a reasonably playable setting that we could try?

I always meant to spend some time experimenting with set-ups, but didn't ever find the time. I did spend a lot of time trying every possible set-up variation on every single bike in Superbike 2000 on PS1 after paying full price for it in 2000.

With no joy

[ShenmueAddict]

^ ive tried tinkering with the settings a bit but nothing helped, its still hard as hell, i still havent beaten the game lol

[saturnworship]

The playability of the game is shameful...but those "dancing textures" a la daytona near the car... men... i still can't see that...

If Mizuguchi would have touched that... the SEGA guys were busy creating another console maybe??

[tempest]

I used to enjoy the game back when it was first released. But time has not done it any favours. Graphically it's worse than Daytona. Whereas Daytona retained the awesome gameplay of the coin-op, and thus was still fun to play despite the poor-conversion, Touring Car was never all that much fun even in the arcades, and the game really suffers because of this and the piss-poor conversion. The steep learning curve really doesn't help the game, nor does the rock hard A.I.. If you play the game for long enough, and tinker with enough settings it is reasonably playable, albeit very frustrating. How people thought Touring Car would be the next Sega Rally when the game wasn't even as much fun to begin with is beyond me.

[Nick1984]

I remember playing this in the arcades back in summer 1997 and hyping it up to be as good as Sega Rally.

Nowadays if a game's good in the arcades you're garaunteed it'll be the same when released on console, back then though arcade machines were much more advanced than consoles.

The official Saturn magazine hyped this game up giving it a 6 page preview and saying it was going to be Saturn's best racing game yet, the very issue after they gave it a 7/10. I strated to lose faith in Saturn after this.

[Galvatron]

I had the PC version of this first and I'm sure that it ran OK. I got the Saturn version later but was really quite surprised at how bad it was, and as everyone else has been saying, how it could possibly be this bad after the brilliance of Saturn SEGA Rally.

[Anthaemia.]

Ironically, the reason why Touring Car is so poor on the Saturn comes down to CRI putting as many details as possible from the arcade source into their conversion, in spite of the fact Sega's console lacked the power to handle anything remotely close to Model 2b quality graphics at a playable frame rate. While most beginners do struggle not to spend every race bouncing from one side of the track to the other, after a while I learned to control the game and found it quite enjoyable - even if the frame rate does inexplicably drop every time you pass under a bridge! If a first generation title such as Daytona USA could do better, it only shows just how much Sega's approach to software slackened after the failed campaign of Winter 1996, when even the company's biggest proverbial guns (NiGHTS, Daytona CCE, Virtua Cop 2, etc.) failed to help the Saturn gain on Sony's then-already dominant PlayStation. At least they did put out a few memorable titles before finally killing the Saturn off for good, although the "less is more" approach still didn't do many favours for the ailing 32-bit platform...

[Nick1984]

I just thought it was down to the piss-poor conversion team, they handles House of the Dead which was equally as shoddy.

[Anthaemia.]

Actually, the Saturn conversion of The House Of The Dead was handled by Tantalus, whose previous track record (no pun intended) included Manx TT and WipEout 2097. Sega took a huge risk farming out Manx TT to a developer independent of its own AM/CS teams, but with plenty of assistance Tantalus did a fantastic job and learned enough programming skills to make their own later Saturn recreation of WipEout 2097 a lot more accurate than its predecessor had been. Sadly, by the time Tantalus was again asked to help out with The House Of The Dead, any concept of quality control at Sega had been carried over to the imminent Dreamcast (and even that wasn't safe, as many of its launch titles were rushed - clearly proving that no lessons were learned after the Saturn's similarly compromised release). Although they managed to get a basic conversion up and running well before their final deadline, Tantalus were never asked to go back and improve on The House Of The Dead, and what the majority of gamers probably didn't know is that a lot of this game's textures were originally meant as placeholders until better quality files were produced. This never happened, and along with other late Saturn era conversions such as Sega Touring Car. For the record, this one was the work of CRI and not Tantalus or even AM Annex, contrary to what is mentioned on the box art - just take a look at the credits if you still don't believe this. As with so many other Saturn developers, CRI started off well enough and got much worse later on as Sega's complacency with all things Saturn related spread. How else can you explain the decline in output from their treatment of Virtual On for the 32-bit console to the (perhaps slightly over-exaggerated) disaster that was Sega Touring Car?

[Nick1984]

I think the conversions of Sega Rally and Virtua Fighter 2 were handled by AM3 and AM2 respectively. Why on earth Sega thought it would be a good idea to hand arcade conversions over to the third parties I'll never know!

They killed a console made popular by great conversions like Sega Rally.

[Anthaemia.]

Sega didn't really want to hand over its highest profile Saturn conversions to third party developers, but it was forced to because the AM departments were busy working on so many of their own projects they simply didn't have enough time or resources to pull of Manx TT without compromising other games that were in development, such as Fighters Megamix, Virtua Fighter 3 and what later became Shenmue. As you may have noticed, the last two examples were ultimately NOT released for Sega's 32-bit console, which explains why Yu Suzuki felt so burned with management after the completion of his epic masterpiece as a Dreamcast title, soon after which he left the company. Anyway, back to Manx TT for a second...

Unsure whether the coders at Tantalus were up to the challenge of recreating a Model 2 coin-op for their over-complicated home system, Sega made sure to keep a very close eye on the conversion of Manx TT, even giving the programmers assistance from their own AM and CS teams to ensure the end product made full use of the Saturn's capabilities. While not perfect by any means, their new-found technical competency allowed Tantalus to go and deliver a fantastic treatment of WipEout 2097 that may not have been possible otherwise - just look at the original WipEout and Battle Arena Toshinden Remix for two examples of typical early PlayStation-to-Saturn rush jobs. Once they'd successfully tested the water with Manx TT and then been proved right by the stunning WipEout 2097, Sega went back to Tantalus with the task of working their magic on The House Of The Dead. Since this was quite a looker even in its original Model 2B form, it was clear the stakes were being raised a bit from earlier titles - only AM2's top secret Virtua Fighter 3 required more effort in terms of how to reprogram such a high quality source onto a less than equal domestic piece of hardware.

As mentioned before, Tantalus achieved something close to a modern-day miracle in getting the whole of HOTD running on the Saturn, and with several months left before their final deadline there was even promise of better textures in the final version - what had been shown off in magazine previews and demo disc footage was still just placeholder artwork! However, proving that Sega was becoming less interested with the Saturn as time went on and the Dreamcast's launch grew closer, it was decided nobody would really mind a few graphical faults if the package underneath played well enough. So, in the end gamers were left with a product that the Sega of old would have more than likely dismissed as a prototype that still needed a lot of work. In the months prior to the launch of its newest technology, we were instead given something that wouldn't have even made the cut a few years before.

Adding further insult to injury, The House Of The Dead came long after Sega's introduction of the "AAA" policy to reject software that was less than astounding. The likes of HOTD and Sega Touring Car had all the gameplay, but on a purely cosmetic front they were also snapshots of how Sega felt about its once flagship Saturn by the (premature, in my opinion) end of its life. I can only begin to imagine how different things had been if Sega waited a few extra months and treated remaining Saturn owners to VF3, Shenmue and a few more conversions from Capcom, SNK and Konami, all while holding the Dreamcast back until it could be assured a pixel-perfect Sega Rally 2 complete with full network support instead of the flawed mess we got instead. Parallel universe theories, 'eh?