There seems to be a wave of retro racers around recently, and each one seems to pick a particular target to shoot with its nostalgia gun, whether Wipeout or Lotus or Micro Machines or whatever else. Maybe I'm forgetting some classic arcade racer, but Victory Heat Rally feels less laser targeted and more a modern take on the spirit of the genre. It's a 2.
5D, "neo super scaler" arcade racer with split screen, drifting, car tuning and a lot of pep. As the trailer below notes, it now has a release window of this winter. The Steam page uses cliché phrases like "crank up", "banging beats" and "high octane energy", but screw it, I think it's justified.
The trailer looks electric. You can play alone or with up to three friends, with championship, arcade and time trial modes. Players also select one of 12 drivers to play as, although I'm unsure whether there's any meaningful difference between the characters or if it's all just style.
You can tune the cars to alter how they feel to drive, however, as well as customising how they look. "Super scaler" was a technology in Sega arcade games such as OutRun that could scale and rotate 3D sprites to create the illusion of 3D. The SNES equivalent, called Mode 7 and used in F-Zero among others, is perhaps better known.
If you don't want to wait until the winter, SPGP Super Polygon Grand Prix released on Steam earlier this week . It's in Early Access, and a lot less polished than Victory Heat Rally seems,.
