Gale Racer

Gale Racer was released only in Japan on the Saturn in 1994 is a conversion of the Arcade game Rad Mobile. While the gameplay is similar to the original, the gfx and music have been updated with intro and outro fmv also added to the game.

The Air freshener / key chain swinging around at the top of the screen features Sonic the Hedgehog which was the first appearance of the sonic character in the original arcade game in January 1991 before Sonic stared in his own lines of games on the Mega-Drive in June 1991.

The game is not that difficult as the cars are always in the same positions, race order at any given time so only a little memorisation is required to beat the game as the timer is no threat in Normal difficulty mode. Hitting the sides of the track will slow you down, but not much although the collision detection between you and track can be annoying at times. In the third or forth stage you will have a boss battle of sorts. Some care is needed while you bash them off the road but they are not much threat to you, except maybe the lorry if he keeps knocking you off the edge. The do slow down near the end of the stage allowing you to overtake and win though. I do quite like the game as a pick up and play game the game in the same vein as outrun. I couldn't give a damn about trying to get best times though.

I have spent way to much time on this longplay, more so than any sane person should. I could have just done a single run of the game and be done, but no...there is something more to show. This version of the game features many Sonic characters which change after every 100 mascots are collected. You can get approximately 60 per complete race, but sometimes more as I can not work out exactly how they are awarded. It is not a simple case of winning or even getting a good time. Some rival cars will throw cans at you and if you play it right you can kind of farm those cans for a large mascot win at the end of the stage.

In the video after completing the game with the good ending, I show a second run except that it is made up of many alternate runs. as you need 100 mascots to unlock the next one, you can imagine this takes up a lot of time so after collecting each one I record a section of race and splice it together to complete one long run. I also show the bad ending after completing the race.

After that race I do a time trial to show the remaining key chains. I have no idea if I have found them all. I just played and played until I had collected 1000 mascots and shown 10 key chains, but the mascot number still goes up! Maybe one day ill go back, but right now I've had enough of it. Annoyingly, once the mascots are unlocked, there is no apparent way to select which one you want visible during the game.

00:00:00 First play with Good Ending
00:28:00 Second play (super edit!) Bad Ending

Some mascots I do not recognise. Maybe you can name them all!

00:28:25 Sonic the Hedgehog
00:29:20 Tails
00:32:05 Metal Sonic
00:34:15 Mighty the Armadillo
00:38:15 Unknown
00:42:00 Robotnik / Eggman
00:44:30 Ray the flying Squirrel
00:46:45 Amy Rose?
00:49:40 Unknown
00:50:33 Knuckles the Echidna
00:51:45 Super Sonic?