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Comment by Netcob | Hacker News Reader

I love the ingenuity, I also love youtube documentaries on this topic, but... as a child (in the 90s), I did not like these pseudo 3D racing games at all!

Mode 7 on the SNES was usually fine. I don't know how accurately it rendered a single flat surface in 3D, but it felt real enough and responsive enough. Except for the very rare cases where they simulated non-flat surfaces (Speed Racer, Super Off-Road), even though that was technically much more impressive.

The effect just didn't work for me - it didn't feel like turning, it just felt like what it was: The game displaying a "left turn" animation and telling you that your car will now start drifting to the right if you don't press left. And that felt more like playing a Game&Watch toy.

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IMO it greatly depends on the game. Very advanced games that used this technique, like OutRun in the arcade, really almost feel like you're driving on a road with real turns. Lotus Turbo Challenge on the Amiga also does a pretty good job giving you the illusion that you're actually approaching turns, i.e. that there is a turn ahead of you and it is coming towards you.

But most games that implemented this technique were much more primitive, and just amounted to "bending" the road to indicate turns, which never feels like there's actually a turn coming towards you. It just feels like the road is suddenly changing its shape. But that's not an inherent fault of the technique, it's just a poor implementation.

I do agree that Mode7 games, which effectively display an almost correctly rendered 3D plane, are generally a much better experience.

Pit Stop II on the C64 felt like you had force feedback on a digital joystick, no less!

> But most games that implemented this technique were much more primitive, and just amounted to "bending" the road to indicate turns, which never feels like there's actually a turn coming towards you. It just feels like the road is suddenly changing its shape.

After looking at a couple videos, I think the "secret sauce" was having objects along the sides of the road to reinforce the illusion of movement. Even in OutRun, sequences where the player drives past objects like trees or road signs feel more convincing than ones in open areas.

A few days ago I made a 50x timelapse of a drive using my dashcam and... oddly enough, that looked exactly like that pseudo 3D effect. It looks like the road is just bending left and right, whipping around out of the blue, while everything else is stationary.

I agree. Even at the time, many of the games that look like this felt like you were being dragged around the track, and just finessing it a bit with the controller input.

It's not a good feeling as a player when a game mostly plays itself and gives you some token involvement.

Lotus III on the Amiga did the mountain tracks almost af if they had some height and so due to the bending effect from the guard rails and being able to see the actual cliffs at the sides. OTOH, curves were better than the average 16 bit racer, as you could step a bit offroad from the curve, but not so much. But it gave the game some believability.

Also, the patched Road Rash 1-2-3 ROMs for the Mega Drive run much better with far more frames, and neither any overclocking is required at all, nor any extra hardware. That make them very good on simulating pseudo-3D races.

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