I can honestly say I’ve rarely been happier this year: walking through a busy Shinjuku arcade, sliding down into an all-new Sega racer and then letting some of the blue-sky goodness and distinguished style wash over me. There’s something just right about Sega and arcade racing, and even if it’s not exactly been quiet in that regard in recent years – the Initial D series has been bubbling along brilliantly – this feels like a return to an older order, with Sega World Drivers Championship slotting neatly into a lineage that includes the likes of Scud Race.
Like that game, it uses real-life motorsport as a backbone for its racing. Sega World Drivers Championship has been out for a while in Japan – the first location tests took place last summer, while it launched proper back in March – but this is the first time I’ve had the chance to try it, and in the meantime I’ve been preparing by developing an obsession with the real-life Super GT series that is Sega’s inspiration. A Japan-based series whose profile has been boosted by Jenson Button’s participation – and his success, his win in Sugo last weekend his first since the Brazilian Grand Prix back in 2012 – it’s nothing short of the best that motorsport has to offer. And if nothing else, it’s certainly the maddest.
A hyper-charged take on GT racing, Super GT takes the GT3 cars you might know from the likes of the Blancpain series and mixes in GT500s – mutated beasts that boast outrageous amounts of downforce and whose lap times aren’t that short of F1 cars. Not that the GT3 cars are that much more pedestrian: there’s a Prius which shares some of its innards with Toyota’s LMP1 car, a brutal-looking Subaru BRZ and a Mercedes AMG GT that looks resplendent in its Hatsune Miku livery.
Source: Eurogamer Sega is back in the arcade racing game in the best possible way