Maximum Speed is a white hot racing game that will thrill all your senses. Not my words - the words of whichever advertising guru came up with the guff adorning Maximum Speed's European marketing materials. And who am I to argue? Absolutley nobody, that's who. Right, let's get crack-alacking.
Maximum Speed was released in arcades in 2003 on the Atomiswave platform, and represents arcade racing in its purest form: there's you, a load of thick-as-mince AI adversaries, a plethora of tracks of questionable design quality and an ever-ticking clock. Thanks to the incredible development efforts of Megavolt85 et al over at Dreamcast-Talk in the recent past, Sammy Atomiswave titles are now playable on the Dreamcast, and we thought it was high time we took a more in-depth look at some of the games that have made the leap from the coin-op to the home and expanded the Dreamcast collection even further.
If you aren't familiar with the Atomiswave story, it's worth taking a look at our guide to the short-lived Sammy arcade format here, and the story of how these lesser-spotted arcade titles ended up being ported to the Dreamcast here.
The two marquee racers for the Atomiswave platform were Faster than Speed, a sort of Need for Speed: Underground style street racing title stacked to the gills with neon strip lights, garishly painted hot hatches and more night racing than you could shake a Tokyo Extreme Racer at (check it out here); and Maximum Speed, a more traditional stock car style racer very much in the vein of Daytona USA. Its the latter of these two (obvs) that we'll be poring over here, to discover why, even though its not really up to the standard set by SEGA's own stock car racing series, Maximum Speed is probably still worth a look if arcade racing is your bag.
From the outset, it is clear that Maximum Speed is a game that's meant to be played in short bursts. Because this is essentially the very same code that would be played on a coin operated cabinet with a steering wheel and pedals (of which there were stand up and sit down variants), probably secreted away in the darkest reccesses of some brick and mortar arcade somewhere, there is no championship mode, no career mode or owt even hinting at anything more than "please put your money in dickhead, play for 5 minutes and then kindly piss off." The only real quality of life improvements for the home console are that the controls have been helpfully mapped to the standard Dreamcast controller, complete with analogue stick and trigger support (which is important - more on this later).
So what you're essentially getting, should you plop Maximum Speed onto your GDEMU (other optical drive emulators are available) is the authentic arcade experience with no home conversion improvements whatsover. Mainly because, y'know, Maximum Speed was never (officially) ported to anything. What you're confronted with when starting Maximum Speed is the ability to play a single race, in any of the initial three classes of vehicle, on any of the six circuits. There are 23 other vehicles also vying for the top spot during each race, and there's a clock counting down that replenishes by varying dwindling allotments each time you reach the next lap checkpoint. So far, so 'as you'd expect.'
The vehicle selection boils down to three different classes, with stock cars, trucks and open wheel variants being slectable, and then each type of vehicle being further sub-divided into three distinct flavours; one being an all rounder, one having better acceleration and the other having a higher top speed. Once you've selected your whip you get to select a track, of which there are six and these are, again, further divided into easy, medium or hard difficulties.
The game explains these difficulty levels using a series of stars to denote how tricky they are, but the operations manual that I managed to scrape from the remnants of the now defunt SEGA Amusements USA Inc. website goes a little further, actually labelling the tracks as easy, medium or hard. Thanks Wayback Machine. For ease, I have now uploaded this operations manual here so you too can view it, dear reader. As an interesting side note, I did find that the preserved website for Maximum Speed appears to exhibit the text for SEGA Clay Challenge rather than the correct copy for Maximum Speed. Not sure why that is, maybe someone absent mindedly pasted the wrong paragraph in there when the page was created. A hangover maybe? Or just plain old incompetence? Who knows...but I digress.
