The point's been made before on these pages, but OutRun2 draws it out again: SEGA is brilliant at five-minute racing games.

There are 15 stages, laid out like balls in a snooker triangle; as you get to the end of each one in your Ferrari, you adjust the difficulty by taking the left path for an easier ride or right for a tougher one. All you're up against is the clock, and your only obstacles are the indecently curvaceous undulations and turns in the track, often peppered with slow-moving traffic.
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The structure hardly matters: you drive a Ferrari and try to avoid losing speed, doing incredibly cool power-slides when you really can't make it through a turn with the pedal floored. In fact, half the time you do it anyway because it's just fun. Snaking a sideways car through lorries and hatchbacks is what arcade racing should be. And as you get better, you pick up tricks like the s-bend shimmy and work out how best to employ your slide. There's also a Heart Attack mode, where you're ranked stage by stage on your ability to do silly things over short distances - drift as much as possible, break the tape connecting traffic cars, maintain a particular line.

OutRun2 SP, released in the arcades once OutRun2 had had time to bed in, is 15 more tracks and a slipstream feature, which lets you suck some extra speed out of the cars in front by lurking in their wake. It's what other games call drafting. SP's also a bit gentler on crash punishment and running off the sides. The whole thing's pretty much as brilliant as OutRun2 is.

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