Super Hang-On

Sega's Hang-On arcade machines are the ones you climb on. You sit astride a plastic motorbike, grip the handlebars and lean it into the bends, and the machine leans with you. A joypad cannot do that. The question for this cartridge is how much of the ride survives when the bike is taken away and you are left holding a controller.

Most of it does. And Sega have added a second game the arcade never had.

Four continents

Arcade mode is a straight conversion of the coin-op. You choose a class from a map of the world, and each continent is a different course. Africa is the Beginner class at six stages, Asia is Junior at ten, America is Senior at fourteen and Europe is Expert at eighteen. The longer the course, the twistier the road and the tighter the clock.

You are racing the timer more than the pack. Each stage ends at a checkpoint, and you have to reach it before the clock runs out. Time left over carries into the next stage, so a clean run early buys breathing room later. Miss a checkpoint and the race is over. Reach the finish and whatever time remains turns into bonus points.

The road is full of other riders, and none of them care about your lap time. They weave, they bunch up on the bends and they sit in the racing line where you want to be.

Each continent gets its own range of backdrops, from the desert mountains of the Africa course to the city skyline waiting at the start of the America race.

Turbo

The controls are steer, accelerate and brake, plus one more. Once your speed passes 280kph, the speedometer glows red and the turbo becomes available. Hit it and flames burst from the exhausts as the bike climbs past 300kph. That last stretch of speed is where races are won, and where most of the crashes happen.

Leaning in

Cornering is the skill. Run wide and you drift onto the verge, which costs speed. Run wide at 300kph and you meet the scenery. Every course is lined with trees, lamp posts and advertising hoardings, and hitting one sends bike and rider cartwheeling through the air in separate directions. The Bird Bird hoarding, with its cartoon bird grinning out at the track, has ended more of our races than any rival rider.

A crash does not end the race, but it ends your chances. The time you spend picking yourself up comes straight off the clock, and on the Expert course there is no slack to give.

The trick, once you learn it, is to brake before the bend and not in it, lean early and get back on the power as the road straightens. The bike keeps its grip if you stay smooth. Snap the throttle shut mid-corner and the back end slides out from under you.

Original mode

This is where the cartridge earns its keep. Original mode is a separate game built for the Mega Drive, and it changes the shape of the whole package.

You start with a slow, unresponsive bike and race one-on-one against a rival, with other riders still on the track around you. There is no time limit. Beat your rival and your sponsor pays out, and the money goes on parts: frame, engine, brakes, exhaust, oil and tyres, each with its own price tag. A mechanic fits them and tunes the bike, and a better mechanic gets hold of better parts for more money. Win and you can afford the parts that help you win. Lose and you are stuck with the bike you have.

Crashing matters more here. Damage the bike badly enough and you have to retire and wait until you can afford the repairs before you race again. The bike also handles differently from the arcade machine, so racing lines you learned in arcade mode need relearning.

A password system saves your progress, so a season can run over weeks. That turns a coin-op conversion into something you build on, and it gives the cartridge a life beyond the four arcade courses.

How it looks

The sprites are large, close to the size of their coin-op counterparts, and the riders are well animated as they tip into the bends.

The arcade board shrinks and grows its sprites in hardware (a trick called scaling, which makes a roadside sign swell smoothly as you bear down on it). The Mega Drive has no hardware for that, so the cartridge carries a set of pre-drawn sizes for each object and swaps between them as you approach. It is a cheat, and at 300kph you will not see the joins.

The road is the other trick. It is drawn line by line in alternating bands of light and dark that slide towards you, which is how the game fakes speed, curves and the stomach-lurching crests of hills on a flat screen. Some games make that striping look crude. Here it works.

How it sounds

There are four music tracks, and you pick one before the race: Outride a Crisis, Sprinter, Winning Run and Hard Road. All four come from the coin-op, and all four are bright, driving tunes built for going fast. Katsuhiro Hayashi, Koichi Namiki, Shigeru Ohwada and Chikako Kamatani handled the music for the Mega Drive, and the console's FM sound chip suits the material. Engine roars and tyre screeches fill in underneath.

The grumbles

It is one player only. A split-screen race against a mate would have doubled its life, and its absence is the biggest hole in the package.

Arcade mode on its own is thin. Four courses and a timer make for a fine half hour, and the Expert course will take practice, but once you have learned the routes there is not much left to find. Without Original mode, this would be a good conversion and little more.

In Hindsight

The Mega Drive conversion is remembered for its arcade mode, but Original mode is the more interesting piece of history. Arcade conversions of this era were judged on how close they came to the coin-op and little else. This one gave home players something the arcade could not, which was a reason to come back next week. A season of races, a bike that improved as you won and a password to carry it over were a console idea, built for people who owned the game rather than people who paid by the go. Racing games went on to build whole careers around that loop of win, upgrade and race again, and this cartridge had it in place early in the Mega Drive's life.

The technical side has aged well. Faking a scaling racer on hardware with no scaling of its own was a hard problem, and the pre-drawn sprite sizes and striped road were how Sega solved it on this machine. It still looks right in motion, which is the test that matters for a racing game.

Its reputation has held. Magazines rated it highly on release, and it sits in the archive as one of the strongest arcade conversions of the console's first year in Britain. The Bird Bird hoarding is still there too, waiting at the side of the road.