Bucket-o-roadkill said:
Holy shit. I thought STCC on the Saturn was universally loathed. I remember a friend being disgusted with his purchase lol I warned him after the demo but he got it anyway. I found the frame rate was so inconsistent it ruined the game, literally. Dipping to ~20fps randomly for some corners.. Totally infuriating. This was the PAL port, perhaps the NTSC version faired better.
Anyone remember the official UK Saturn magazine giving STCC a fairly decent 'unbiased' review, only for readers to bombard them with complaints when they bought the game and found it was terrible. Hilarious... If you didn't buy it..
It's Sega's fault, their lack of support led to the Sega Saturn's death. SEGA had an amazing SEGA RALLY engine that they could have given to every developer so they can create any amazing racing game on the machine but they didn't do it. The majority of the engines SEGA's team created they kept it for themselves. It was only a select amount of developer's that managed to adopt Sega's engine - such Tecmo's team adopting the Virtua Fighter 2 engine to create Dead OR Alive on the Sega Saturn.
Sony was the complete opposite as they push the engine support of their playstation machine to as many developers as possible and it paid off.
So in regards to Sega Touring Cars Championship, the ONLY reason why I purchased on the Sega Saturn was due to the music - it's incredible! The gameplay though is actually really unbalanced, dull and unfair, especially when your car gets so crippled when you take a perfect racing line.
You see, your cars only handle well on very light curves, push any further and they dig in so hard it's damn near impossible to keep the sort of speed you should be achieving with your line and entry speed. To top that off, your control style doesn't apply on the CPU drivers which is unfair. Plus, the mechanics of the last course (your car's response to the tarmac) is completely different from the rest of the game.
It's incredible that the vibe of the game and the gameplay itself in Sega Touring Cars Championship are two completely different things!