Daytona USA (Saturn)

The Sega Saturn may not be the most obscure piece of hardware from Sega, but it certainly feels like the black sheep of the bunch. Positioned between the kingmaker that was the Genesis and the beloved underdog that is the Dreamcast, Saturn sort of embodies the decline of Sega as they struggled with how to push forward beyond the 16-bit era. The library for the system is still well-regarded, but one of its most remembered releases, Daytona USA, actually reflected poorly on the console despite its popularity. Despite being billed as a tentpole title for the system, it had a major graphical downgrade from its arcade counterpart, and compared to the original PlayStation’s port of rival Ridge Racer, Daytona USA made Saturn look weaker when it was already flagging in the sales race. Racing games are often a graphical benchmark for a system and sadly Daytona USA made Sega look bad with its showing, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it failed as a racing game in general.

One hard to pill to swallow for any prospective player of Daytona USA is that the game only features three unique race tracks. Sorted into Beginner, Advanced, and Expert designations, they do all feel quite distinct from each other at least and come in mirrored versions to play as well. The Beginner track is the Three-Seven Speedway, a course based on real NASCAR tracks and thus quite simple for it. It’s essentially one big loop, but it’s thankfully not just a straightforward oval. Given the slight hint of a triangular shape, the track has a few moments of speed-building straightaways and a few lingering turns that ask you to approach them properly. Driving in Daytona USA might not quite feel realistic, but there is a subtlety to how you use the directional pad to take turns, the car sliding if you’re too sharp and micro-adjustments sometimes a smart move. You have to make sure your turning isn’t too deep or too shallow when you start reaching the most ornate part of the track. While NASCAR theming is so prevalent here that there’s a completely pointless Pit Stop area with an associated animation that just burns precious time, near the hardest turn on the track there are multiple gambling related signs and a large mountain bearing Sega’s mascot Sonic the Hedgehog. Here is where its easiest to mess up if you haven’t gotten down how to turn, how much speed to have when turning, and whether or not you want to drift the corner or try to approach it more carefully. As the designation suggested, it’s a good beginner’s course and one that will get you acquainted with a game whose replayability comes not from an abundance of variety, but the difficulty of what it offers.

Daytona USA’s courses do not give up wins easily. The other racers are all excellent drivers and if you do so much as one crash even on Normal difficulty, it is very likely you won’t be claiming top spots. You can continue easily after you smash hard enough in a wall to make your car tumble, but even taking a turn too poorly can be grounds for a restart if the gap between you and the competition suddenly gets too wide. The customizable difficulty does mean you can change a lot about the race, there being general and enemy difficulties ranging from very easy to very hard, but Normal strikes an excellent balance in having victory be hard to get but well-earned when you do finally have the course knowledge and game know-how to grab it. Playing on too low a difficulty will make things go by way too quickly though, but at least once you have trained up through Normal you have the harder difficulties to set as a next goal if you want to keep using your practiced skill.

A bit more customization comes from playing the tracks in different modes. Arcade mode focuses on keeping a certain pace, the player needing to keep the timer from running out by hitting checkpoints often enough during the race. Saturn mode instead makes it a pure battle to get first place, but both modes can also be presented in modes like Grand Prix and Endurance where the lap amount is changed. Your choice of car and transmission is also important to success, different stats and whether or not you have manual or automatic transmission determining things like top speed and how well the vehicle controls. The cars all look very much alike though, save for the unlockable horse that isn’t slowed down by off-road racing which is a fun easter egg in a game with many little secrets that you will probably only experience by looking them up instead of finding them naturally.

Returning to the two remaining tracks to discuss, the Advanced course is called Dinosaur Canyon and has a much greater focus on turn variety and frequency. Structured like an interstate road cutting through an area filled with mountains and natural sights, the frequency of turns really demands the player to have gotten a hang of approaching turns properly back at the speedway. Turns happening quickly after each other and requiring different amounts of drifting or speed reduction can lead to game-losing errors if you aren’t careful, but the more natural surroundings make it a better sight than the NASCAR inspired starting track. Learning the visual cues of things in the environment is another part of getting your perfect driving down pat, but training up in a course is always going to feel a little repetitive even though it can lead to a much more satisfying first place finish than one more easily earned.

The Expert course is the most complex by far, Sea-Side Street Galaxy perhaps too extreme of a name for what comes down to a race between two parts of a city connected by a long bridge. Thinner driving areas, plenty of turns, and even portions where you can decided to drive a few different paths forward make this a course where mastery will come from having to look at a lot of variables. Three adjacent roads can be split by barriers you can weave through to skip past the turn taken during them, but an error can be much more damaging to your chances here than the other tracks. In a more typical racing game or on the lower difficulties for Daytona USA this would definitely serve as an interesting departure from the other courses in concept, but placing high is most demanding here and the push for the win can really start to lose its luster once you’ve got this far. Unless you’re really interested in sitting down with one track for the long haul, its complicated design might be off-putting when it comes to casual play. Unfortunately, while it could have thrived in multiplayer racing, the original Saturn release lacked such an option, this being one of the biggest knocks on potential replayability.

While sparse on content all around and relying heavily on you committing to the journey to perfecting your skill, there is something easier to appreciate in Daytona USA, and that is its iconic soundtrack. While it’s hard to call the music outright good, there’s an odd appeal to the sometimes out of tune and unusual warbling of its vocal tracks. While the visuals are often grainy, have low draw distance that makes seeing the upcoming track a little hard to see, and strange animations like a rival racer suddenly jerking sideways far too far to be believable, the music is of a high audio quality even if most of its appeal is its unusual nature. The speedway begins with a rolling start, something the backing track for the course calls out with a long sustained call of “ROLLING STAAAAAAAAAAAART!” that is then echoed. The backing instruments almost feel like fight music before more melodic vocals join in wordlessly, but it’s definitely Let’s Go Away in Dinosaur Canyon that steals the show. Another sustained proclamation properly introduces the game by way of “DAYTONAAAAAAA!”, the rock instrumentals behind it a good fit for action racing but the vocals return with an almost scat like quality to them and make it unusual but catchy once again. Sky High on the Expert course continues the trend of backing instrumentals that get you pumped to race, but it also features the most real lyrics that also most clearly show that it’s a Japanese speaker trying to sing in English, meaning anything but their long calling out segments can be hard to make out. While not as memorable as the other two pieces of music, it’s also catchy in its own way, and the character and personality in the music is undeniable. Even the menu and Game Over music certainly feel like you’re listening to someone’s strange but wonderful vision for the soundtrack, and in a game built around repetition, the music thankfully has a style to it that won’t really wear you down and is likely to stick with you well beyond the time you spend on the game.

THE VERDICT: A distinctly memorable soundtrack and heavy focus on skillful racing help Daytona USA not be doomed out of the gate by its surprisingly limited race track selection. Performing well on three decent to good tracks is valued over providing variety, and while the options do their best to shift things around to make it last longer, Daytona USA does feel a little trapped into trying to make these courses last. Looking rather rough but playing well, Daytona USA’s challenge is learning its racing style and developing deep track knowledge, but it still feels like more should have been done with this arcade port than piling on modes that don’t change up its three courses all that much.

And so, I give Daytona USA for Sega Saturn…

An OKAY verdict. An unforgettable soundtrack and its importance as part of the Saturn’s library mean Daytona USA doesn’t fall into that mass of forgettable racing sims that do their job about as well as they could for the time. Daytona USA’s racing is built well enough and the emphasis on excellence does mean there is a lot more depth to a course than many other racing games as each turn is a challenge to be learned under punishment of an almost guaranteed lower placement. The burden on the three tracks is a bit too much for them to bear though. Three-Seven Speedway is heavily reliant on that difficulty sweet spot, lower difficulties making it a cakewalk and the limited amount of turns meaning it can become trivial once you’ve mastered the racing mechanics. On the other hand, Sea-Side Street Galaxy is packed with little routing decisions and tight turns and the process of mapping out the best way to race through it can feel like too daunting a time sink to get invested in. Dinosaur Canyon does achieve a good central balance, but this uneven package certainly could have used at least double the offerings so that you can still get that focus on course mastery without the problems that come from the limited variety.

Daytona USA may delay the satisfaction of victory until you’ve well and truly earned it, but it does so without being overly demanding about it. The degree does vary depending on your settings, but there is a suitable racing challenge built in because of the strength of the driving fundamentals. It’s still certainly too lean for its own good and relies on you deciding to commit quite a bit to it sadly, but there’s little wrong with the actual play. Couple that with some songs you won’t be able to get out of your head and Daytona USA is suitable for what it is but certainly not the kind of racing game that will wow anyone playing it now.