A conversion of the Sega arcade racer, Turbo Out Run was ported to the FM Towns by CRI (CSK Research Institute) and published by Sega in 1989. In truth, it’s not a particularly good version of the arcade game as it lacks a number of features, doesn’t look as good, and doesn’t play as well as its parent.

In the configuration menu you can change the number of stages in the competition (from one to sixteen); you can change the skill level of the opponent’s car and the time adjust (easy, normal, hard, hardest), and you can change the controls to either gamepad, mouse or joystick. There’s a sound player and volume adjust, and that’s about it.

The tunnels from the arcade game seem to be missing, as do the weather effects and the spectacular crashes. I actually kept trying to crash, to see if the car would roll (and throw the driver and his girlfriend out), like it does in the arcade version, but it either drove through the roadside objects and did nothing or just spun on the ground, which was disappointing.

One thing that is faithful to the arcade version, though, is that your girlfriend passenger does get out of the Ferrari and gets into your opponent’s Porsche if you come second to him in any of the stages… You can win her back, though, if you beat him in the subsequent stages… Which is funny and stupid at the same time.

The graphics are okay, although they do seem like a (very) rough approximation of those in the arcade version, and sometimes the other cars don’t even look like they’re actually making contact with the road…

Sound-wise: Turbo Out Run on the FM Towns is again just okay, with most of the tunes from the original featuring as streaming red book audio, although to be honest the music isn’t really to my taste (the soft metal guitar solos got on my nerves quite quickly).

Overall, Turbo Out Run is the first arcade port I’ve played on the FM Towns that isn’t too close to the original, and isn’t very good. And that’s probably because a third party development team tried to replicate the arcade game, and failed. Sega should have converted this themselves and released a better port.

I would’ve been disappointed with the FM Towns version of Turbo Out Run if I’d paid money for it back in the day. It’s really not good enough, and the FM Towns is capable of – and deserved – better.

More: Turbo Out Run on Wikipedia