 Sssss-ess drunk! Sometimes when there's no access, or not enough money for a particular license, game devs will still plow ahead with whatever game they were making, even though anyone can see it was clearly made in the image of a certain movie or comic or TV show, or whatever. We saw it pretty often on the NES with Journey to Silius, for example, which was originally supposed to be a Terminator game, and you also see it on the SNES and Genesis occasionally, too, with games like Outlander. This is clearly just Mad Max 2 the game. For those unfamiliar, Mad Max 2 is part of the movie series starring Mel Gibson. It was released in the U.S. under the title The Road Warrior, and it's after the apocalypse and fuel is in huge demand and there's lots of driving and leather. Apparently, the publisher Mindscape did actually have the license for Road Warrior at one point, but lost it for one reason or another, but they decided to just release the game anyway for Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis in April of 1993, and they just decided to call it Outlander. Despite this being planned as merely a Road Warrior title, this game is majorly ambitious. You start immediately after the title screen, controlling a car, just hold the Y button to accelerate and B to use your unlimited ammo to gun down these people on motorcycles that want to kill you for some reason. As you can see, you're not exactly feeling a great sense of speed here. This game runs slowly, and the frame rate sucks. It could definitely use some help from an improvement patch that utilizes the SA-1 ship. But still, what's here is really impressive because of the sheer amount of detail they put into this part of the game. When you run over bikes, they explode, of course, but you sometimes get a tire that flies off and rolls down the road with you. If a biker comes up next to your car, another window pops up on the screen and you can use the L and R buttons to fire a shotgun to the side. The rear view mirror up top also has a great amount of detail, tracking multiple bikers that are following you while your character grimaces while taking damage. You can even go in reverse by holding down on the D-pad to run over bikes behind you. It can be tricky to get the timing right, but if you're able to do it, you see the biker fly up into the air while their bike explodes. In later levels, you get helicopters coming after you and you use sidewinder missiles to bring them down. There's even turbo boost you can pick up. Just press up twice and you'll go, uh, slightly faster. The driving may not look impressive and definitely could use a touch-up, but all the extra bells and whistles here are really cool. The thing is, though, if your health meter at the bottom of the screen runs out, it's game over and you have to start over and check out this game over screen. Woof, that is brutal. Your health meter carries over to the next game mode as well. Once you get low on fuel, pull over to the left side of the road and go kick the crap out of some dudes on foot in a side-scrolling beat-up section where you look for more fuel and other resources, and, uh, yeah, not the most polished gameplay here. The whole idea is to walk to the right and smash open some crates so you can collect as many items as you can, and it's everything from better armor, food for extra health, and weapons and fuel for your vehicle. One interesting wrinkle here is that some food has gone bad due to being contaminated by nuclear waste, I guess, and it can actually do a ton of damage, but you can also find a Geiger counter, which helps you avoid food that's gone bad. That's nice and all, but, oh, the controls here are just freakin' awful. They're really slow, and your character moves at a leisurely pace. C'mon, dude, this is a post-apocalyptic action game. Get a move on! The hit detection is just plain bad. It's one of those games where you can walk right past enemies and not take any damage, but any attack they do within a comparatively huge range will hit its mark, whereas your attacks have a 50-50 shot at actually landing. Here is the most effective way to get through these beat-em-up sections. The old fist to the groin. Yes, that's right, ignore your weapons. You just scuttle your way to the right, duck, and punch them in the balls. Apparently, your character has more in common with Johnny Cage than the road warrior. But, yeah, while the driving sections are actually kinda interesting, these sections are such a chore to get through. At least once you labor your way through this, you pick right back up where you left off in your car. As I alluded to earlier, this game did get a Genesis version with some minor differences, the biggest being the performance being a bit better, with the driving parts running a little more smoothly and a bit faster. It just doesn't feature the rear view mirror up top. But for the beat-em-up parts, the controls still suck, and the best way to move ahead is still just to groin punch everyone. I only wish you could kick in this game, so maybe you could pretend the protagonist is a grown-up Bobby Hill. The Super Nintendo version of the game features the music of Mark Knight, a longtime chiptune artist some folks might know as TDK, and he's worked on sound design and music for tons of stuff over the years, everything from Crysis, The Witcher, and lots of Amiga ports like Wing Commander and Battletoads. This is some of his earliest stuff, and while there's not a lot of music here, what's here is pretty dang good. So yeah, Outlander has some really interesting stuff going for it, and I'd love to see what this game would look like with an improvement patch that speeds things up a bit. But as it is, it's only a good game on paper. The execution throughout this one is pretty sloppy. The driving sections are at least interesting and kinda fun, but the side-scrolling sections just flat-out suck. Also, I should mention that if you want to complete this one, it's a really, really long playthrough, and the settings barely change, so no, I'm not using footage of just the first level. This is what the whole game looks like. The Genesis version is marginally better, and it actually has a password system, so if you want to play this one, I'd go that route. But otherwise, I'd just wait and see if this one gets some kind of patch to improve the performance. Alright, that's all for now, and I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.