Cruis'n USA

Review

by Adam Ziegler

Cruis'n USA as an arcade unit sold in droves and became an instant classic. It was a racing experience that featured a wide variety of automobiles, well thought out track design and a relatively crisp mixture of polygonal and 2D pixel graphics.

It held its own against the competition in the arcade going head to head against Sega with its DaytonaUSA and Namco and their Ridge Racer series. Both Sega and Namco were able to achieve faithful home translations of their respected racers, Nintendo was not.

Cruisin USA as a home conversion lacked in every sense of the word. What was executed as an arcade classic, originally programmed by game industry legends, recieved quite a hack job in its arcade to home conversion. The conversion team was made up by only 6 members total. The publishers reason for this was simple, sighting that the arcade version of Cruisin USA was run on similar hardware as the Nintendo 64. The only glaring difference lies in the storage medium, the Nintendo 64 features 8MB cartridges, the arcade board reads off of seemingly limitless ROM's, giving it more space to store textures and frames of animation. The two most obvious things the Nintendo 64 version lacked were textures and frame of animation.

The home conversion was an obvious sloppy rushed project. It suffered from the immortal sins of polygonal pop-up, jerky animation, loose un-responsive controls and even worse, the sound track sounded like '70s cowboy B-Movie score.

Despite Cruisin USA's inferior testimony, it is a million seller and is due atleast a rental before you go by some game reviewer's opinion. If you have never played the arcade version or never played a racing game at all, you just may like Cruisin USA for Nintendo 64.