Though it wasn't exactly a launch title for the Saturn, coming about a week later, Gale Racer still feels like a title that was made purely to experiment with the hardware, then released just to boost the fledgling system's early library. It's a port of the 1991 arcade game Rad Mobile, whose main claim to fame is being technically the first game to feature Sonic the Hedgehog, as a decoration dangling from the rear view mirror.
It's not an exact port of Rad Mobile, having some changes and additions made, not all of which are positive, like how there are now loading screens between stages. Most of the changes are small and not worth noting, but a big one is that while the stages themselves are still made using sprite scaling as in the arcade, all the cars are now polygonal models. This mostly looks fine, though there are occasional moments where it looks like the cars and the road exist in completely different worlds to each other.
In fact, sprite scaling is, more than most forms of videogame graphics, an optical illusion. Two dimensional sprites are shown changing size very quickly so that they look like they're moving in a three dimensional space. The illusion frequntly breaks down in Gale Racer, though. It looks fine when there's a lot of stuf at the side of the road, but when there isn't, it starts to look a lot like you're driving down a rollercoaster track suspended in a strange empty void.
As for how it plays, it's kind of a mixed bag. Mostly a bag filled with bad stuff, but there's some good in there. For a start, the car feels very strange to steer. I think it was a mistake giving a sprite scaling racing game a first person viewpoint, as it really feels like the car doesn't steer as much as it does swivel on a central point underneath it. It's something that takes a lot of getting used to. Collisions are another problem, in that they're incredibly inconsistent. If you hit another vehicle, you might pass through it, you might lose a bit of speed, or you might come to a complete stop for several seconds. There doesn't seem to be any solid determining factor as to which of the three things might happen.
There's a couple of weird things, too. Like how you have buttons for activating your headlights and windscreen wipers. They can only be used on certain stages, and you have to use them for those entire stages or you won't be able to see anything. Since you have no choice in the matter, why aren't these functions automatic? Very strange. Also, though you're overtaking cars the whole time, this seems to mainly be an aesthetic thing, as you're really racing against the time limit, and it doesn't seem possible to finish the game within that limit without also passing every car. Furthermore, there's times where the logic of the race takes some time off.
The biggest example of this is one stage that's conceptally very cool, though it's also very frustrating to get through. Basically, there's an entire stage where the only other racer is the homicidally agressive driver of an articulated lorry, who you race against along a long winding mountain road with a sheer drop off of one side. There's no chance of seeing this guy on any earlier or later stages, and he always appears in this one, no matter what position you hold in the the race.
I actually own a copy of Gale Racer, or at least I did at some point. Maybe I still do? Either way, the only reason I bought it is because it was dirt cheap, and I wanted more import Saturn games with no language barrier. This was also in those ancient times before Saturn emulation was as reliable as it is now, of course. In this day and age, though, you probably are going to be playing your Saturn games through emulation, and there's many much, much better racing games on there. Some with fan translations, even! So don't bother playing this one.
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