Super Hang On/Genesis

[Alienblue]

SUPER HANG ON / Genesis / C+

I recall two things. But I forget what they were........oh yes. I recall playing HANG ON in an arcade in the late 80's and thinking it was AWESOME at the time. I also recall paying $49.98 for SUPER HANG ON for the Genesis in 1991 and thinking it was also awesome. It is a huge step up from the skimpy, tiny little master system cart. It includes the complete arcade mode with four different race tracks and four musical tracks to select. In 1991 this was an awesome driving game. The controls are tight, the colours rich, and you can even speed up with the turbo button, not seen in the coin-op that I recall.

But time has not been kind to first person racing games. After playing OUTRUN on the PS2 sega ages collection, I played this and I was not amused. It starts out promising, with a nice START gate and signals, but the 3-D scaling.......or attempt to fake scaling.......is horrible. The illusion of 3-D is very weak, with light and dark bands of colour alternating and a single object on the side of the road.......a lamp post, a bush, a sign.........scaling in, using about three frames of animation.

It is so amazing we once considered these graphics to be AWESOME! Despite the choppy graphics though, the game is at least playable and includes an original mode in which you race for money and buy bike upgrades.

As one game on the sega six pack cart this was a nice little racer, but I would not pay more than $3 or so for the original cart. Racers have speeded up and passed this wreck long ago. VROOOOM!

[Leo1]

The Genesis version, in my opinion, was never particularly good. There were far better racers on the 16 bit consoles that have aged far more gracefully than this game or the Genesis conversion of Outrun (Top Gear on the SuperNes, for instance, is just as entertaining as ever).

The original arcade version of Super Hang-On is still a great game to this day. Keep an eye out for Sega Arcade Gallery for the Game Boy Advance if you want to enjoy a better port of it. It has far improved scaling and a smooth frame rate that blows away the attempt at porting it on the Genesis. It does, however, lack the nice original season/championship mode that the Genesis version added with upgradeable parts and such. But the gameplay can't be beat (Except with the original arcade cabinet).

And Super Hang-On always had a turbo button. You must be thinking of Hang-On, which this game was the sequel of. The original was far closer in concept to Pole Position than this game was (The Sega Master System game is a port of Hang-On, not Super Hang-On).

And we've gotten some excellent home versions of the original arcade Hang-On in recent years. Both Shenmue games allow you to play it as does Yu Suzuki Game Works. And it wouldn't surprise me if there was another game or two that included it from Sega over the past decade or so. The scaling is extremely smooth and reminds me a ton of Pole Position with the original arcade version of Hang-On.

The included arcade games are worth keeping an eye out for Shenmue on the Dreamcast or Shenmue II on the Xbox if you own either console and ever see a good deal on one of the Shenmue games, even if you have little interest in Shenmue itself.