Interestingly, the real-world Daytona race course was rejected during development as being too repetitive to race on, so the three fictional courses were developed instead.įor starters, the arcade mode can be played in a number of different ways: a close recreation of the original arcade experience, or a longer “grand prix” session over a larger number of laps, with optional tyre wear mechanics necessitating pit stops at appropriate points. The arcade version of Daytona USA offers three courses to race on: a Beginner course with a tweaked tri-oval layout an Advanced course that sees you racing around a rocky canyon area and an Expert course that takes you to a lovely little seaside town. In contrast to Virtua Racing’s flat-shaded polygons, Daytona USA wowed audiences back in ’94 with its 60fps fully texture mapped polygonal environments - something which even home consoles of the period couldn’t quite match.

And titles like Daytona USA are a fantastic example of this.ĭaytona USA, lest you are unfamiliar, is Sega’s 1994 follow-up to its classic arcade racer Virtua Racing, which got a cracking Sega Ages port to Nintendo Switch a while back. Over time, the platform grew into a rather more generic digital download store - but it never quite forgot that all-important “arcade” side of things. But then we had Xbox Live Arcade, which began its life as a digital download platform specifically for these short-form arcade-style experiences that no longer had a place at retail.

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