Reviews

This is a driving game where you race against the clock. It's main difference is that the tracks fork at the end, so you get to choose your route, 15 different tracks in total.
This coin-op conversion got some mixed reviews and was generally considered a considerable letdown when it was released in 1987, so much so that I never played it at the time.
I'm honestly not sure why people were so upset with it, it wasn't as if the Spectrum really could do an arcade game like this justice. Having said that, it does look like the arcade, plays well (dodgy collision detection aside), and isn't anywhere near as slow as I'd been led to expect. I recommend it. The multiload is a pain though, but at least on the 128k it remembers the levels you've been to.
ACF

Oh dear! US Gold just had to screw up another license, probably one of the biggest games on the Speccy and.....its crap.

Okay its playable I'll give you that BUT the graphics are monochrome, all green, meaning the red Ferrari doesn't look like a Ferrari it just looks like an ordinary car. The game is pretty slow and gets slower depending on level detail which loses every element of speed a game like Out Run should have. And the multiload is a disaster, with emulation its probably not much so but back in the day, yeah it was a right pain.

So sadly Out Run is a right dud. Ocean's WEC Le Mans, a game massively overlooked in the arcades by Out Run is streets ahead on the Speccy while Chevy Chase and Miami Cobra GT, made by "smaller companies" and released on budget price are also more playable and enjoyable than this. Out Run was supposed to be massive and in the end it isn't. Shame on you US Gold.

This conversion was the cause of a heated debate among Spectrum users, and it's not hard to understand why. The original coin-op had so many features which simply weren't able to be ported on 8-bit machines, Spectrum included. It would have been impossible to convey the same sense of speed and smoothness of movement of the original coin-op to those platforms, so the different programming teams chose to do as much as the hardware restrictions allowed them to.

That said, the Spectrum version is far from being an unsuccessful effort. The game is there to be found - no levels have been left out: the scenery and opponent cars are all there. The sheer amount of detail slows down some levels noticeably, but on almost all of them the speed is not worse than other similar games on the Spectrum.

Yes, the multiload is a pain in the neck - but it's very quick and at least on 128K Spectrums you don't always have to load the levels you already negotiated. The +3 version benefits from almost instantaneous loadings from disk and is therefore the closest to the original.

As Chris Jenkins aptly wrote in his review of the game on the January 1988 issue of Sinclair User, the Spectrum version of Out Run suffered from a heavy burden of expectations which wouldn't have been there were it not for the complexity of the coin-op, and the final result was as close as we could get given the limitations of the Spectrum itself.

Out Run should have been a classic but its poor sense of speed destroys any chance of that. It ain't all that bad though as it can still be quite enjoyable, it's just a shame it isn't more than it ought to be.

Unlike many conversions I owned I had actually played the arcade Out Run and would compare it to say, the second coming.
So I didn't have high hopes for the speccy version and therefore wasn't as disappointed in what we got as many of my friends were.
I did persevere with it tho and it is by no means the worst port of the game.
Out Run is not so much a classic arcade game but a Legend. The speccy version, not so much.

This isn't all a bad game but its flaws are so painfully evident and visible. The speed of the game leaves a lot to be desired, it suffers when there is too much on the screen at once and this slows everything right down, even on 128k, the fact is there are even games on BASIC which run faster than this game. The speed also causes steering to be hazardous at times. But I think the main reason this port was a disappointment was its multiload, especially when it's done in a want/found setup, meaning you might end up waiting quite a bit to play on through, so I normally play the +3 version to eliminate that. Everything else is fine, especially the wonderful music, but it lags so badly at times which ruins the fun of it. It's a shame.

1987 US Gold (UK)
by Ian Morrison, Alan Laird, Jas Brooke, Nick Bruty

After the grandeur of the coin-op arcade, expectations on 8-bit machines were very high.
This only led to disappointments, of course, not only the Spectrum limitations were immediately noticed on the game design, but speed issues left many players wondering if this was really THE Out Run they had seen in the arcades.
Well, Out Run is a racing game and one of the many letdowns of the Speccy is: Speed (you guessed it).

Any of us could survive a monochromatic city, with weird almost unrecognizable landscapes, we all seen that before, but speed is crucial to a racing game, specially one that requires beating time limits.

Still for many of us lucky ones who never saw the arcade version, this was a great game, not the best, but great.

Out Run...Out Crawl more like!

Harsh, but true I suppose, although I will say I did get some enjoyment from this game as late on as 1993 when I got my second Speccy. Which fortunately was a +3. I got the disk of this game in the Bundle that came with the machine.

This is this games one saving grace for me, as it took a few seconds to load each level in, I cannot even begin to imagine the frustrations of my tape deck owning brethren when it comes to playing this rather bog standard conversion.

Graphics are mono, gameplay is very hit and miss, but I will say even though I have heard several people say the sound is crap as well, that I quite like the AY rendition of Magical Sound Shower it's certainly not abysmal by any means (even though it does seem to skip a few notes here and there, especially when the screen fills up). I cannot even begin to imagine the frustrations of my 48k owning brethren not only having to multi-load, but playing in silence as well.

I'll be honest looking back the game is pretty turd, and it kind of looks and moves like a Tiger handheld game, who knows maybe the Tiger Handheld version is better than the Speccy? I cannot even begin to imagine the frustrations of everybody 48k or 128k, disk or tapedeck owning, that a crappy pocket game potentially might have been better than a home computer version that cost an extortionate £8.99, or an even more extortionate £12.99 for the disk (which incidentally I got for free, another blow softened I'd say).

I'll give it an average score, I've played worse arcade conversions for more powerful machines, and to be fair back in '93 when I first played it on my own Speccy it didn't seem that slow. I'd played it previously nearer to the release date, but can't even remember where, probably one of my cousin's friends houses?

I suppose it's a nice curio for collectors if you have a big box disk in good condition, but you might as well play the actual arcade machine on MAME these days (Or one of Sega's many other newer games, they seem to love shoving it into their more modern games as a mini-game these days).

Outrun [U.S. Gold]
by Probe Software Ltd (Ian Morrison, Alan Laird, Jas C. Brooke, Nick Bruty)

Decent as much as unexciting conversion of a coin op I maybe played once.
There were definitely better "racing" games released in 1987.

3/5

Great arcade, but the conversion to speccy lost all its magic...a green ferrari Testarossa? C'mon!

The tape had the original arcade music, that I still enjoy.
A great ad campaing converted it into a sales success, but the game does not deserve such a success, there are better car games than this one.

People say this is a great game and people say this is a pile of crap, it's neither. What it is however is a weak offering of what was and still is one of the most iconic arcade games ever.