Maybe it is because by now I am a casual gamer and I feel that this game is friendly to casual players (even if you keep losing you can play to the end and still have a good time playing, get better and start winning later) but I would totally recommend this game to anyone who grew up with games like "Lotus 1-3", "JaguarXJ220", "Crazy Cars" or "Top Gear 2". I bought it despite the bad reviews, and I am glad I did. Two of my all time favorite games are "Lotus II Turbo Challenge" and "Lotus III". I still play them on the Amiga Emulator from time to time. This game strifes more towards Outrun of course. I never played that back in the day and later I never liked it as much as the Lotus games (probably because it is very unforgiving). I agree that the slipstream does not work as well as intended. So far I do not quite understand when it actually activates (and yes: in the tutorial you will probably not be able to finish that part). But the drifting is really fun! Activating is easy (read the tutorial) even for an old Amiga-Gamer like myself, and then it feels much like in the Lotus games. Hitting obstacles does not slow you down much while drifting. However if you miss the drift, crashing does hurt. The speed penalty is rather mild though (at least on "Easy" setting). You may want to play around with the gfx settings, I would recommend the NTFS filter unless you like screamingly bright colors. Also the CRT option is nicely done. Despite the repetetive assets (have you payed any attention while playing Outrun, though? The answer is either "no, I was too fast" or "yes, same variety there") I can clearly see the love for these kind of games that went into creating this one! Oh, and I got to race against Bob Ross (under a different name), that alone makes it a happy 5 star game ;-)
It is one of my favorite games of all times! The story keeps you going and each mission of the storyline is different. The style of the entire game is great! Even for that time the vector-style of the characters had some kind of retro-look, which added to the overall "blast from the past" feel of the game (even the box-art, the manual, the music ... it all fits together well, and is one of the reasons why I still can enjoy the old graphics of the game). The GOG version includes "Nitro Riders" which was a standalone game, but content-wise was more like an expansion-pack. It gives adds some new cars, melee-maps and several new missions which take place before the events of I76. Here you play as Jade, Taurus or Skeeter. So far the GOG-Version works fine with Win7, even though Win 7 is not listed in the minimum system-requirements. I never got the original to run well with anything above Win98, and to use it with Win7 required quite some hacks, so they must have done something right. I could not play through the entire game yet, I know my original version would crash with Win7 in some later mission of the storyline, I hope the GOG version does not. The sound of the weapons is a bit glitchy, seems like the sound files for the shots are not played for their full length. If you don't know the original game, you will probably just think that some sounds are a bit too quiet. This is also a problem with the original version using a recent Windows, though. Out of the box the GOG-version does not use glide, as you can see from the screenshots. I always thought the original graphics to look nicer than the glide version anyway, so I'm happy with that.
