An ill researched viewing of this comparison will leave the impression that
these 3D racers failed to age very well. That impression is superficial. These
Saturn games feature graphical prowess and game play complexity that easily
rivals any games released from 1995-1999 on comparable hardware. From a graphical
standpoint the games scale upward from Daytona USA to Touring Car Championship.
Gameplay between the four games is only comparable in the sense that they are
all racing games of an arcade style.
The Daytona games feature very similar gameplay with only minor tweaks in the very unique power slide mechanics. In all of the arcade and home versions of Daytona the core of the gameplay is to master the power slide mechanics to eliminate the need for slowing down around curves. The physics, speed and controls are all carefully designed to promote a racing experience that is easy to pick up to play and rewarding to master. Instead of focusing on driving the perfect line while slowing down sufficiently for curves, Daytona encourages a more unique experience. When driving full speed up to a hairpin curve, the player is encouraged to slam on the brakes and then floor the accelerator. This combination causes the car to fishtail into the curve and a careful combination of steering and acceleration can eliminate the need to slow down through the curve.
Sega Rally and Touring Car Championship represent steps toward more simulation-oriented physics. Both games encourage the player in a similar way to the Daytona games to master their respective power slide mechanics. Sega Rally pits the player against the effects of dirt and asphalt and features power slides that are more realistic and intuitive than in Daytona. Touring Car features some vehicles in common with Sega Rally but emphasizes high-speed track racing over off road. The biggest difference between these two games is the dramatic up swing in realism that Touring Car features in curves. Touring Car cannot be classified as a simulation in the vein of TOCA Race Car Driver but it does add significant speed and realism to Sega Rally’s physics engine that was no doubt hardware intensive.
Marketing has caused hardware prowess to be the primary topic of discussion among fans of game consoles. Fanatics are products of advertising campaigns. A comparison of the actual games being marketed usually debunks the claims of game software producers. Marketing attempts to link aesthetics, and the intangible pleasures thereof, to video games by means of their visual appeal. Common wisdom over the visual appeal of video games asserts that technical advancement corresponds to more beautiful video games. Technical prowess is never relatable in any measurable way to beauty in video games.
Sega’s racing game releases from 1995 to 1997 made significant technical progress and yet the impressiveness, as measured by game magazines’ and game players’ reactions, declined. Daytona USA displays 60,000 polygons per second at fifteen to twenty frames per second. Sega Rally was released six months later and is viewed as vastly superior graphically. Judging from Sega Rally’s longer view distance and solid thirty frames per second this could be attributable to graphical prowess. Daytona displays more complex trackside detail, though, and also has twenty cars on the track in comparison to Sega Rally’s five or less. Considering those factors makes the graphical comparison more complex, but since the frame rate in Sega Rally is double that of Daytona the former can be considered generally superior.
Daytona Championship Circuit Edition serves as confirmation of Sega Rally’s
graphical superiority because it uses the same graphics engine. Daytona CCE
has a slightly longer view distance and runs at double the frame rate of Daytona
USA on Saturn. Assuming that Sega Rally’s graphics engine was not altered in
the creation of Daytona CCE, the Sega Rally engine is therefore both aesthetically
and technically superior to Daytona USA’s. Similarly, the later released Daytona
CCE Netlink Edition (aka Circuit Edition in Japan) features even longer draw
distances than Daytona CCE, along with revamped texture maps. The Netlink Edition
proves how vital additional months of developement time could be on the Saturn.
Sega Touring Car Championship throws a wrench into the whole comparison, as
it is technically superior to the other racers but is considered to be aesthetically
inferior. Sega Touring Car’s frame rate is also lower than the 30 frames per
second of Sega Rally and Daytona CCE. As objects in Touring Car approach the
screen, though, they tend to become distorted or pop out of existence. These
graphical glitches combined with the variable frame rate to overwhelm the technical
advantages of Touring Car’s graphics engine. If these flaws were better disguised
or less frequent Touring Car would still seem less smooth than Daytona CCE or
Sega Rally.