Ocean Drive Challenge

I should probably preface this review by noting that I don’t have my drivers license.  Apparently the state of California thinks that I would be a danger to others on the account of my epilepsy.  And yet they still let Mel Gibson drive.  Hmmph.  Well, no matter.  I can still play racing games.  I play them very poorly, but I can still play them!  Over the next three reviews, I’ll be taking a look at some recent racing titles to hit Xbox Live Indie Games.  It might sound redundant to do three like-minded games, but actually all three are very different.  This is because all three picked an entirely different series to shameless copy, or “pay homage to” if you’re all googly-eyed nostalgic for this sort of stuff.

The first one is Ocean Drive Challenge.  It’s a street-racer that borrows from the Sega classic Out Run in the same way that a pick pocket borrows from you.  You choose one of three cars and try to get from point A to point B before time runs out.  That’s pretty much it.  Honestly, the game is a fairly good tribute if you’re into this sort of thing.  It’s not uncommon for an XBLIG clone of a cherished 80s coin-op to be kind of shit, but Ocean Drive Challenge really is pretty damn close to Out Run.  The cars handle the same way, the sense of speed is about the same, and the graphics are light and cartoony.  You even select what kind of music you want playing before the race begins.

All the annoyances of Out Run are here too.  Like being stuck on a two-lane stretch of road and having the left lane contain a gas tanker and the right lane be occupied by a comatose grandmother.  Or the cars interpreting your control movements as polite suggestions that can be gracefully ignored.  There’s also no modes of play besides the main arcade race.  It’s probably beatable but I was never good at these sort of games and could only make it halfway through the course.  Whether you call it Out Run or San Francisco Rush or Cruis’n USA, the time you get back for clearing a checkpoint never seems like it’s enough, at least for me.

Really though, there’s not a whole lot I can complain about here.  I can’t even bitch about this being a game that only nostalgic cocknuggets could find delight in, because it’s actually a well made game.  The cocknugget crowd that sometimes has to shut down parts of their brain to convince themselves that a bad clone is just like the childhood game they remember will probably have their heads explode when they play Ocean Drive Challenge, because it really IS just like the childhood game they remember.  Having said that, if you’re a really big fan of Out Run, why would you need this game?  Wouldn’t you already own it?  Maybe as part of a compilation disc, or on an emulator, or maybe you own the actual arcade cabinet.  Ocean Drive Challenge is close enough to Out Run to be impressive, but also close enough to be useless.  It actually makes me wonder what exactly the developer was thinking.  Making a really accurate clone of a twenty-five year old arcade game on an entirely different platform using completely different tools does take a lot of skill.  Imagine if they had taken that skill and applied it to a new concept.  The results could have been really amazing.  Instead, they did the video game equivalent of spending six years at MIT just to take a job in photocopy machine repair.

Ocean Drive Challenge was developed by need1D

80 Microsoft Points once caused a seven-car, multiple-fatality pileup on a slot car racing track in the making of this review.