Daytona USA

Sega’s mission statement for the ’90s in a three-track package. Where Ridge Racer points to energetic hard dance and concrete urban environments¹, Sega zagged and descended into full kitsch. Daytona splatters mismatched grotesque fonts all over the interface, drills three-reel slots into a rock overpass on the one course even vaguely related to the NASCAR tracks that inspired the game, and lets cars go lazily flying after head-on collisions only to bounce gently back onto all four wheels. Mitsuyoshi’s soundtrack anchors itself against auxiliary percussion-heavy rhythms relying on dense syncopation reminiscent of batucada, flavoring them with squelchy bass and urgent ninths on retro keys. To build out the sound, Mitsuyoshi liberally samples himself, with the limited clip length giving his voice a robotic tremolo on sustains. And above it all: the blue sky, the brilliant lighting, all against cleanly textured cars deforming like cardboard models. It’s the same look and feel that Sega would carry all the way through the Dreamcast era; no matter how tacky or garish, it’s the essence of their gonzo arcade philosophy.

At the core of it all is the drift. Daytona’s physics are grossly exaggerated, letting you calmly spin the car while moving forward and snapping back into place when you straighten out, but unlike some of their other titles, the game absolutely demands you pay attention to the engine’s power band. Torque scarcely registers until you hit around 6000 RPM (sometimes to a fault, jerkily lugging the engine just a couple hundred below unless the player quickly shifts down and back up), and with that comes an noticeable shelf on grip. Going into a drift from 4th gear down to 2nd will instantly send the car spinning without a follow-up correction to re-establish control in a higher gear. Conversely, at full speed in 4th the car can barely turn at all, and even for small adjustments on later courses you may have to slip from 3rd to 2nd or 1st briefly just to throw your back end out. By the Expert course, without perfect lines, there’s a good chance you’ll have to shift on almost any turn, and knowing exactly what wheel speed you want to shift to and what gear you can catch yourself in to re-establish your grip matters.

The second-to-last turn in Expert expects the player to not just know how to initiate the drift, but how to peg it at a specific angle for an extended period of time without straightening too early or spinning out. [src]

It helps that the escalation for the level of drifting nuance the game demands from you is sublime. Beginner starts off with the traditional banked track of a NASCAR course², simply testing the player’s fine-grain movement on the initial turns until throwing a tighter one at the end that requires a drift. The long straightaway ahead of it gives the player ample time to fix their speed, making each drift attempt more consistent. There’s room here to play with different angles for the turn depending on which gear the player wants for a particular turn angle, how much throttle they want to apply ( twisting the car while keeping the wheels spinning), and what speed they want to drop to before straightening out. Advanced has a similarly grip-friendly first half before a soft chicane out of the early tunnel leads to a minor adjustment drift point straight into proper drift turn. Throwing these two back-to-back before another quick drift at the bottom of a downhill and an extended drift leading back to the finish line helps set the player up for the grueling Expert course. By placing these turns in close succession, minor speed or angle fluctuations in earlier turns will propagate to later ones either in how the line alters coming out of a turn or in how a later drift should be altered to account for a different speed coming in. Expert not only makes these issues feel near constant outside of occasional straightaways, but it also throws new ideas at the player in rapid succession: braking before turns to ensure that a specific low speed is reached at the end of the drift, drifting between pillars, and a deadly hairpin turn at the end. The jump in difficulty seems staggering due to one of the hardest turns in the game showing up first, but learning to limp through the rest of this one will transform your playstyle from memorizing specific turn angles and speeds to organically adjusting them depending on entry speed or execution mistakes. It helps that each of these courses is dotted with useful landmarks for timing your actions, such as a black sign before the final turn on Beginner or a ragged wall texture before the final turn on Advanced.

To inject a bit of additional dynamism into line construction and drift execution, you’re placed alongside 19 to 39 additional cars in each race. While hitting one from behind will severely cut your speed (if not topple you), their sides sap very little speed and serve as perfect cushions to more aggressively ramp speed during turns, and their occasional taps on your rear bumper can spike your speed enough to salvage dud runs. The extra speed they give you while drafting behind them also significantly breaks your speed cap when abused. This ends up making Beginner more interesting than it would be otherwise in the long term thanks to it having 40 cars stuffed onto a cramped course, upping the skill ceiling through leveraging the extra tools that the other cars give you while simultaneously avoiding colliding with them. Their effect is less present in the other two courses, especially Advanced, where a intermediate player can get into first place after the first lap and not see another car until halfway through the fourth. Still, the depth of their interaction adds another layer to the experience that elevates it beyond pure memorization.