Review of Virtua Racing on Switch: staggering update of a technical benchmark

Virtua Racing is one of the most important games in Sega's history, but it has never been an ideal way to play it outside an arcade. Despite multiple attempts, technically defective conversions from Mega Drive and Saturn to the PlayStation 2 remake, Sega has not yet been able to capture the 1992 classic from the comfort of your home.

Until now, anyway. The new version of Sega Virtua Racing It's amazing, and since it's on the Nintendo Switch, you also get a portable version.

Virtua Racing It was one of the first fully polygonal 3D racing games ever designed and certainly the most advanced at the time of its release. It was running at 30 frames per second, which seemed incredibly smooth at the beginning of 3D, and introduced for the first time 16: 9 widescreen monitors in the arcade. It was also the first game to run on Sega's Model 1 arcade hardware, which also powered the 1993 machine. Star wars arcade game and the first Virtua Fighter. The ability to change the angle of the camera has been particularly innovative.

For the Switch version of Virtua Racing, released as part of the Sega Ages series, Sega has recruited M2, the remastering assistant behind the company's impressive 3D Classics conversions for 3DS. M2 has kept the original Virtua Racing active, but doubled the frame rate to 60 fps and increased the resolution to 1080p on a TV and to a native resolution of 720p in wearable mode.

The results are amazing. Virtua Racing has almost three decades, but his artistic style in the flat shade has beautifully aged. There are no fuzzy textures or models too ambitious to draw you from experience – it's a minimalist and striking visual presentation where everything seems consistent. Virtua Racing The realism was at the time, but it perfectly matches the aesthetics of the blue sky of the Sega brand.

More importantly, the game itself is fantastic. Designed by the legend of the Sega Yu Suzuki arcade and designed by Yakuza creator Toshihiro Nagoshi is a fairly simple arcade take on Formula 1 with timed control points. It has only three tracks, but the manipulation is subtle and the artificial intelligence sets up a good fight. For some reason, the Switch is not a system with a lot of good racing games, but this version of Virtua Racing is comfortably one of the best. It's also the only racing game I've ever seen that offers a hilarious – but surprisingly practical – multiplayer mode for eight players.

Now Virtua Racing for Switch is only available in Japan, where the Sega Ages versions are still published before the rest of the world, but there is no reason to think they will not come out soon. If you really can not wait, then luckily it's quite easy to create another Switch account to download games from the Japanese eShop: it costs 925 yen, or about $ 8.50.