Having grown up in the advent of computer games, I remember playing Night Driver on the Commodore Vic-20, which also was an arcade game with only white blocks heading toward you and a plastic cutout overlay of a car attached to the screen.

Later on, with the Commodore 64, games like Epyx's Super Cycle captured some of the excitement of Sega's arcade Hang-On. There was also Pole Position clones like Pitstop and Pitstop II (which added pitstops as well). Accolade brought Test Drive out, using real cars and rocky roads. Also there were more like Chase HQ, Speed Buggy, RoadBlasters, each of which presented the same simplified parallax racing game genre, but with their own twists.

Eventually, on the Commodore Amiga, there were games like Lotus Esprit which gave a far better experience than the 8-bit games could.

But also around this time, there was Outrun and later Turbo Outrun, which was available in the arcade and on practically every home computer and console. The music was always an important part of these games, and I can see that the developers of Horizon Chase Turbo were influenced by these classics, the Outrun series especially.

The music definitely harken back this period, one in which music voices were often limited to 2 to 4 voices, and so music often employed tight ans fast arpeggios to give the illusion of chords. Such arpeggios are in the music for this game, a telltale sign of their influences. I immediately recognized the music in China as the same melody from the C64 classic Way of the Exploding Fist, which itself lifted the melody from a 1952 musical piece called Dance of the Yao People.

So, how does this game stand up to all of these? Does it add anything new?

It stands up well, fits like a glove for those familiar with these types of games — racing games in which you barely need to steer on the most extreme of turns and instead just point in a direction and feather the gas to steer in or out of the turn. The collection of gas and tokens is another such common mechanism.

In many ways, this is a bog standard parallax racing game, but there is nothing wrong with that and it does so perfectly. That's why I like this one, it's visually modernized, but the gameplay is classic.

Having grown up in the advent of computer games, I remember playing Night Driver on the Commodore Vic-20, which also was an arcade game with only white blocks heading toward you and a plastic cutout overlay of a car attached to the screen. Later on, with the Commodore 64, games like Epyx's Super Cycle captured some of the excitement of Sega's arcade Hang-On. There was also Pole Position clones like Pitstop and Pitstop II (which added pitstops as well). Accolade brought Test Drive out, using real cars and rocky roads. Also there were more like Chase HQ, Speed Buggy, RoadBlasters, each of which presented the same simplified parallax racing game genre, but with their own twists. Eventually, on the Commodore Amiga, there were games like Lotus Esprit which gave a far better experience than the 8-bit games could. But also around this time, there was Outrun and later Turbo Outrun, which was available in the arcade and on practically every home computer and console. The music was always an important part of these games, and I can see that the developers of Horizon Chase Turbo were influenced by these classics, the Outrun series especially. The music definitely harken back this period, one in which music voices were often limited to 2 to 4 voices, and so music often employed tight ans fast arpeggios to give the illusion of chords. Such arpeggios are in the music for this game, a telltale sign of their influences. I immediately recognized the music in China as the same melody from the C64 classic Way of the Exploding Fist, which itself lifted the melody from a 1952 musical piece called Dance of the Yao People. So, how does this game stand up to all of these? Does it add anything new? It stands up well, fits like a glove for those familiar with these types of games — racing games in which you barely need to steer on the most extreme of turns and instead just point in a direction and feather the gas to steer in or out of the turn. The collection of gas and tokens is another such common mechanism. In many ways, this is a bog standard parallax racing game, but there is nothing wrong with that and it does so perfectly. That's why I like this one, it's visually modernized, but the gameplay is classic.