Slipstream

The game is an excellent old-school arcade style racer with a phenomenal soundtrack.

See, one thing i never liked about all these retro revival of 80's and 90's aesthetics popping up in the last decade is how sanitized they feel. I do love me some 80's eye candy, i follow lots of tumblr blogs posting gifs and screencaps from around that period, i consider it the best decade for music and wrestling, and the history of videogames as they were still finding their footing is endlessly fascinating to me. It's not that i'm against the premise of recreating those blessed times, it's that... where are the washed out colors, the bad fashion, the underlying anger, that feeling of uncleanliness, the excitement for a brighter future, the bushes? Too much purple, where does the purple come from? You never see that stuff be given the proper showcase and i think it's an unforgivable disservice. You only get to see the phoney glitz and glamour, even when that's not a work of art's original intent. In that sense, Slipstream is... no different than any other attempt at capturing that deliciously unpleasant 80's magic, really. But it's still a good ass game so i'm willing to look past its witless, clichey presentation. Alright, maybe that was a bit mean. Slipstream by all accounts is a pretty little thing to look at, putting to proper use a long forgotten technique Sega used in the 90's for their arcades, where multiple sprites where applied in fast succession over a 3D space to give the impression of concrete environments as you were moving. Not quite Mode 7, not quite Outrun, something in between. EDIT: ♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥ i confused Outrun with Super Hang On my bad, Outrun already did that stuff. And of course the music if fantastic. You could say the sinthy vibes are a bit derivative, a bit larpy in a way, but i maintain that the soundtrack is a fantastic companion for when you're racing through the many tracks this game has to offer. Yeah, for what's pretty much just a solo project and a racing game, Slipstream has quite a lot of content to chew on. There's the usual Grand Prix cups, available in either a basic format or with purchasable upgrades between tracks, an arcade-like gauntlet where you earn a set amount of seconds for each track you clear until you're out, a marathon where the person in the last place of each track gets eliminated until one is left, and of course your bog-standard time attack and single races. The mode i liked the least is the Cannonball, essentially just a bunch of tracks stitched together that is only good for farming the rivals completion rate. Right, this game's got a rivals system! It's not too deeply developed or anything and they don't appear in Grand Prix which is a shame, but the sprites for each character and their quotes are charming in their simplicity. The sense of speed is way radical, far out, whichever slang from yesteryear you can think of. After a slight learning curve either to figure out a track or just get a sense of how to drive, it's so gratifying to nail a drift, zig-zag between a cluster of cars in front of you, knowing when to keep yourself for long enough behind another racer so you can trigger the Slipstream and sprint past them. It's such a fun game to master. BUT, there's a few things i'm not terribly happy with. The roster of cars is far too limited compared to the wealth of content in every other aspect and the cars themselves aren't too diversified from each others, the progression and trophy system is a bit weird in how it will count certain things only under specific circumstances, and vague to grasp in case you wanted to 100% the game, but the biggest problem is the rewind. Man, i HATE the rewind feature, it almost ruined the whole game for me. What the ♥♥♥♥ am i supposed to make of it? You can't turn it off, there's no penalties for when you use it regardless of the game mode or difficulty, it's easy to accumulate and if you use it the way it's intended, which means any time you make a mistake, it pretty much nullifies any kind of challenge... why is it like that? Of course you could just not rewind and rawdog the game as is, which is what i did after using the feature once and realizing how empty winning that way feels, but one of my biggest pet peeves is when a game dangles over your head a win button and you have to go out of your way to ignore it, especially when you're racing on the heavy style which is so much more punishing and the temptation grows. Maybe i'm just overthinking this whole thing. I most definitely am. It's a good ass game, don't mind me.