Got online with the PSP version earlier. Had a lot of waiting for people to finish a long race only to get kicked out before they did, but I did manage to get one race in. It was good fun and I very nearly won, but a crash between my main rival and me right at the end let the guy in third come through for a win. I felt a bit bad because everyone else was using novice cars and I was in my Testarossa, but I’m not sure what the etiquette is there.

And I’ve tried the Xbox version now.

The bad first… The new grainy look doesn’t agree with my LCD TV at all. Xbox stuff generally looks worse than anything else. The original OutRun 2 was an exception, but this new version looks pretty bad. Water Falls suffers most, looking like the singal’s coming from the other side of the English channel via a broken set-top ariel. Or something. Need perfect 360 compatibility now. I might even buy a rip-off slightly-enhanced 360 port, but this isn’t EA we’re dealing with.

Some of the sound’s a bit odd, too, especially the passing car noises.

Okay, that’s the bad. The good is everything else. it handles perfectly, it plays perfectly. On my first run down the SP easy route I beat my best PSP time by about ten seconds, using a less good car. And I’ve managed to unlock the 328 GTS, which is as lovely as it was in OutRun 2. I put it on for a quick five minute check befiore bed and ended up with forty five minutes of drive time under my belt.