says Lycett. “We also wanted some
way for players to replay the game
to unlock new cars, tracks, music
and more.” Those needs led to the
Coast 2 Coast mode and it remains as
challenging and as expansive as you’d
find in any of Sumo’s later racers.
Can you handle it?
Of course, all of those extras come at
a technical cost, and while the original
games ran on hardware that shared a
lot of common ground with the Xbox,
Lycett’s team still found creating
Coast 2 Coast rather tough. “The main
challenge was that Chihiro had 128MB
of RAM compared to the Xbox’s 64MB,
so a lot of work went into reducing
everything to squeeze into that tighter
memory limit,” he says. “That meant
we had to look at reducing the texture
usage across the board as well as
try and stream assets in, rather than
hold them all in memory.” Other issues
cropped up while Sumo was working
on Coast 2 Coast’s extras, with the
reverse unlockable tracks offering
a particular headache for the team.
“Everything is built like a movie set
and was only ever intended to be
viewed going in a certain direction,” he
continues. “Plus with the optimisation
we’d done to fit it into memory, we
had to go back to the original arcade
assets to rework them so you could
drive those in reverse, which meant
essentially reworking 30 tracks. It kept
the art team very busy!”
In addition to creating new assets
and game modes Lycett and his
TOP We just can’t
get enough of
the drifting in
OutRun, it’s so
satisfying.
ABOVE All of the
courses are
diverse and a joy
to blast through
in your Ferrari.team were also busy ensuring the
15 available Ferraris were every bit
as exciting and exhilarating to use
as their real-life counterparts. While
we’ve not actually driven the cars
in question, in Coast 2 Coast each
and every one feels significantly
different to the one before it, from
the exceptional handling of the 360
Spider, to the quite frankly terrifyingbrute power of the Enzo Ferrari.
Mastering each and every vehicle
will take an age, adding to the sheer
longevity of Sumo’s game, and let’s
not forget the special tuned versions
of each vehicle, essentially doubling
the available cars to 30. Needless to
say getting each car to feel ‘just right’
was a lot of extra work. “The challenge
was making sure the controls mapped
well to the joypad and we spent a lot
of effort with AM2 to make sure that
was right,” Lycett remembers. “As the
tuned versions typically had a much
higher top speed, it was challenging
to make sure it didn’t introduce
any strange physics or collision
behaviours. You want to make it feel
like you’re driving right on the edge,
but in a predictable way. Plus we had
to make sure we could still load in
stages quickly enough, even though
now you were traversing the junctions
much faster. Let’s say a few late
nights were spent on solving that!”
Those late nights were well worth
it, as Sumo’s game remains one of the
best racers on the Xbox. It might not
have added anything new to the genre
and its pure focus on maintaining that
‘Beautiful Journey’ meant it couldn’t
compete with the visceral thrills and
spills of Criterion’s Burnout series,
which was also popular at the time,
but it simply didn’t need to. There’s
a simple joy to powersliding around
immense bends and past world-
famous landmarks that’s as relevant
today as it was in 2006. Hell, it could
well be the drive of your life. QMore Xbox news at gamesradar.com/oxm THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE 103