Cruis’n USA (Arcade)

A cross country road trip from coast to coast is a common dream for those who love driving across the United States, and Cruis’n USA tries to bring that dream to life in the arcade while trimming out those long inevitable dull periods. Putting you in an arcade cabinet with a steering wheel, brake and gas pedals, and the option to either have a manual or automatic gear shift, Cruis’n USA aims to gamify the road trip so that you’ll want to keep putting in quarters to keep racing across the United States.

Cruis’n USA tries to take a fairly typical racing game and dress it up by having the tracks be more than simple courses you pick from a selection screen. While you can still go for a single race by picking a level from the starting menu, the Cruise the USA mode that offers a trip from San Francisco to Washington D.C. is definitely meant to be the main attraction, the game having you tackle every course in order. Technically, your performance in the individual races doesn’t matter much towards staying on the tour, the cross-continental trip continuing so long as you feed the machine a quarter to start a new race, but if you do manage to get first place on a track, the game will let you play the next one for free. The fact you can continue regardless of performance is a nice touch albeit one that makes the race a bit less intense depending on your pocket change, any place but first only going to cost the player 25 cents per track if they wish to see the rest of the route to the White House.

Once you pick from a set of four vehicles (or a few extra if you know the secret input to make them appear), the player is placed in a race with up to nine computer controlled cars. If the Cruis’n USA cabinet has an adjacent screen though, another human player can join in, although it does seem like sometimes the game won’t let a player hop into the Cruise the USA mode and just leave both players sitting there waiting for the “join the race” counter to tick down so they can have separate races. Driving is about what you’d hope for from an arcade cabinet with a steering wheel, offering force feedback so it feels more authentic than using something like a controller or joystick but not being too true to life so you can be more wild and sloppy than if you were driving a real vehicle. It’s about the baseline of how an arcade racer should control, which means the enjoyment of the game falls on the driving and track design.

Almost every course in Cruis’n USA takes place on a two to four lane road, tracks expanding or tightening the street to make avoiding other racers and staying on the road more difficult. Offroading in Cruis’n USA is almost entirely detrimental, few courses providing any advantage to leaving the tarred path since the street very rarely winds in a way where you can conceivably cut through grass or dirt to take a shortcut. In fact, the general layout of many tracks is on a surface level very plain and straightforward. The road will have some twists and turns, a few hills, and a jump here or there, but very rarely does the track’s shape ask a lot from the player. There are some exceptions, the Redwood Forest and Beverly Hills both having a few windy roads where it’s easy to offroad if you aren’t careful, the forest especially dangerous as you can end up careening off into the trees quite easily at the start. Unfortunately, when the track does get a bit more aggressive in design, it reveals that the driving is serviceable rather than tight, these sections asking for a bit more precision than you can likely manage in a race where the AI drivers seem to handle it with inhumane fluidity. The tracks aren’t so plain that they’re boring, but their design rarely seems to be the main challenge the player faces. That instead falls on hazards.

As you travel across the country, the road you are taking certainly hasn’t been cleared for a race. Oncoming traffic is a constant problem no matter which part of the USA you find yourself in, and if you’re in the wrong lane, avoiding collisions will be a regular part of your drive. You can also collide with other racers, the AI thankfully fallible in that it will hit the same obstacles or each other along the way. While there is potential for pile-ups, Cruis’n USA takes an interesting approach to car recovery. Your vehicle cannot get wrecked nor will you need to reverse if you end up smashing into something. Reorienting your vehicle is entirely handled by the game, your car even able to find itself back on its wheels after hitting something so hard it does an aerial flip. You still lose plenty of speed for colliding with something, and with little way to catch up with other racers besides hoping they’ll not drive optimally this can doom you to a low placement. However, the automatic adjusting of your car is meant to get you back in the action quickly… even if sometimes that feature instead thrusts you into more danger.  Besides oncoming traffic there are area specific hazards, things like the barriers or buildings beside the road obvious but pillars and toll booths might be placed between lanes in places like Chicago and getting too close to the road’s edge might lead to you banging into a telephone pole in the more rural locations. The dangers on the road are what keep Cruis’n USA from becoming too bland, although some like the train you need to beat to the crossing can be a crash you can’t avoid if you’ve come to it too slowly. Seeing the entire train get smashed off the track cartoonishly as your own vehicle twirls through it is definitely a funny sight at least, but the hazard focus when it comes to who comes out on top can make races with too many feel a little skewed towards the computer players and ones with too few end up rather mediocre and forgettable tracks.

Your trip across the USA does change the backdrops enough to make the courses feel somewhat distinct though, although Death Valley and US 101 can feel surprisingly similar when their differentiating gimmicks aren’t on screen. Most courses aren’t very long, the player taking two minutes to clear them usually but needing to keep their pace up and hit checkpoints or else they’ll be timed out and disqualified before they can finish the race. There’s a pretty good spread of different environments, deserts, cities, and country roads mixing up their designs well enough that a repeat visit to an archetype brings with it something new. When you look at the course selection though, it certainly doesn’t feel like a true American road trip though, the game having seven of its fourteen courses set in California. To be fair, these stages do have a lot of potential to tap, the Redwood Forest unique in its visuals and San Francisco and Los Angeles are both good places to hit, but courses like US 101 or LA Freeway could have been scrapped to better explore the midwest that they are all too happy to glance over. In the course named The Grand Canyon you actually start in the Arizona landmark and somehow end up finishing at Mt. Rushmore, a huge chunk of the map condensed into a 2 minute course that neither feels speedy enough to justify it nor does it feature much to make the transition feel like its occurring. Many tracks, even when focused in the area they’re representing, feel like they can end too quickly, especially when the design doesn’t embrace the location very well. However, while Iowa and Indiana do feel like odd places to have devoted tracks, taking the highway through farmland does provide its own variety, including animals who might wander onto the road and surprisingly explode into bloody chunks if you hit into them. Washington D.C., perhaps appropriately, feels the most realized with many recognizable and distinct areas, it being the final track before you get your reward of partying with then president Bill Clinton in a hot tub on top of the White House. A very silly ending for a racing game that feels like a warped view of an American road trip, but it doesn’t feel well earned since the absurdity will be granted to you no matter how well you do in races where placing well sometimes just boils down to mild obstacle avoidance.

THE VERDICT: Cruis’n USA tries to turn a cross-country high speed road trip into an arcade racing game and does a decent enough job of it. Putting aside things like the imbalanced focus on California, it provides a selection of race tracks that mostly feel distinct and their hazards require you to do more than simply drive as fast as you can. However, your AI opponents, while not perfect, are fairly adept, and even if you go for the single race option, winning a race can sometimes feel inconsequential because of luck factors and the computer racers’ advantages. There is still a fun set of race tracks to play with controls that mostly do their job, but Cruis’n USA’s action focus means it goes by too fast and doesn’t push hard enough to make it more than a servicable arcade racer.

And so, I give Cruis’n USA for arcade machines…

An OKAY rating. The idea of Cruis’n USA is fun even if its priorities were heavily West Coast focused, but the race tracks that make up your road trip just aren’t exciting enough to make this premise work even in game form. Yes, a real cross country road trip would have dull periods and wouldn’t allow you to drive sports cars against nine other people during it, but it would probably be a bit more fulfilling than a racing game that’s major shakeup to standard design is it handling your crash recovery for you. It’s not bad per se, but when Cruis’n USA’s gimmicks become pronounced they’re hard to manage like the Redwood Forest or likely to only impact things negatively like the train that runs on its own time. More hazards like oncoming traffic or the pillars between lanes feel like the way of incentivizing excellent driving, and if these were both felt more and could impact the other racers more often, Cruis’n USA’s plain road design could be easier to overlook. For an arcade machine you sit down in and get a burst of high speed action though Cruis’n USA seems to do its job, but if you take the 14 track path to Bill Clinton’s Jacuzzi, you’ll find some of the appeal wanes as it only nails challenging design sporadically.

Some adjustments would need to be made to the goal of driving across America to make it enjoyable, but Cruis’n USA feels less like it made necessary adaptations and instead tried to string together its course ideas into a broader tour. It is still interesting to see some recognizable locations or have a state shape the tracks and backgrounds, but it doesn’t commit to the idea of the tour or the area’s influence on the track enough to make this feel like more than a typical arcade racer.