ARCADE WATCH
Keeping an eye on the coin-op gaming scene
Hang on a minute, what year is it? Just months after launching Daytona Championship USA, Sega is at it again, proving there’s more to the arcade scene in 2017 than videmption machines and roomy VR set-ups. The game in question is Sega World Drivers Championships 2018, and within a week of its announcement it had already been the subject of location tests in Japan.
While such tests are typically as much about marketing as they are gaining player feedback, here they were crucial, since the game supports cross-site multiplayer, allowing up to 45 players in different arcades to race each other in realtime – though multiple cabinets can still be linked together for purely local play. The action edges more towards the realistic end of the spectrum, with six-speed gearshift, an array of function buttons set into the force-feedback steering wheel, in-cabinet speakers to let you communicate with team members, and even an LED speedometer.
At the end of a race, a series of graphs rate your driving skill – measuring, for instance, how well you took corners – which feeds into your overall score. Driver records will be stored in the cloud for ease of access as you move between arcades. In Japan, anyway: given the cabinet’s premium featureset and online functionality, a western release seems unlikely. But if Sega can reveal two arcade racers in a matter of months, we suppose anything’s possible.