Sega Touring Car Championship Game Sample - Sega Saturn

Original Air Date: January 12th, 2009 (Revised Today!)

Sega Touring Car Championship is far from my favorite racing game, but it's at least decent if given a chance. Made in Arcades in 1996 and later ported to the Saturn in late '97, it's considered the obscure cousin of Daytona USA and Sega Rally Championship, but not nearly as good as either. While having a staple variety of cars and stages for the time, it allowed players to tune several areas of their cars like modifying top speed and handling, play the Saturn or Original Arcade mode, and activate a variety of fairly neat cheats and modes depending on internal system settings and the type of controller you used. The game also delivers one of the greatest "senses of speed" out of any Saturn racer (which is offset somewhat due to an inconsistant framerate) and Netlink support. It's better than it appears at a glance... but...

My gripes? One is that the game has a rave-worthy soundtrack, but there is no option to reduce the LOUD SFX volume, only to raise the BGM volume. However, even at the highest setting, the music still gets drowned out... it's quite annoying. Another issue is the play control. While you have the ability to tune several areas of any car you select from the top speed to handling, they've never felt particularly easy to control no matter how you set them. What makes this worse is that the game is particularly demanding in the challenge department; it's tough even on the lowest setting and you can be moving at top speed and not crash into anything and still find yourself falling far behind.

Factor in that the cars have almost no differences in the way they handle no matter how you customize them, the mixed-bag presentation (which, while impressive in a sense, is hard to watch due to particularly limited draw distance), and the relatively uninspired track design, and you have an overall mixed bag of a game. It's not nearly the worst Saturn racer, but you wouldn't be missing out if you've never heard of this game or played it (I'd burn the soundtrack to a CD though). This is a video of some of the game, revised at higher quality. Enjoy.

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• Sega
• Touring
• Car
• Championship
• Saturn
• Racing
• Driving
• Cars

[Cerv3ro]

Did you use an emulator? and a normal control pad?

[Vysethedetermined2]

@Cerv3ro No to the first, yes to the second (though I've played it with other controllers before).

[alvieao2]

The Saturn version is a mixed bag... There's a lot of inconsistency in the framerate, and why does it run so jerky? The fact that this conversion handled by CRI doesn't help matters at all, since they've ported many Sega arcade games in the past (their track record is mixed at best).

[AlexGRFan97]

Finally someone that can play this game! I thought I was the only person in the world that could win races on the console and PC ports of this game.

[Cerv3ro]

Did you use an emulator? and a normal control pad?

[SegaFanatic5188]

@alvieao2 Well a lot of the later ports were released in incomplete states. House of the Dead if I remember correctly was released when it was only about 60% complete. They still needed to go in and replace place holder textures and models with the final ones and fix a few things. I wouldn't be surprised if Touring Car shared the same fate.

[wonsak]

i rememeber that after sega rally i was really waiting for that game and it was a big dissapointment, few tracks, crappy streering, it was a bad game i can tell ya

[Shadowserg]

Wow, the music is awesome!!

[gunboss201]

didn't know you can change colors of the car