Here’s the short answer: It’s the original Daytona USA running at a higher resolution, but without the Daytona license. The long answer isn’t much more exciting — after seeing the game in action and playing each track a couple of times, it seems obvious that Sega Racing Classic is simply a repackaging of the original game with only minor enhancements and at least one painful omission: the iconic soundtrack, which introduced the exclamation “Daytonaaaaa!” into the gaming lexicon. It’s certainly not Daytona USA 3, and calling it an HD Remix even seems like a stretch.
This is from a 1UP preview. Further down the page the author documents that the arcade was asking $1.50 per play for this.
So then, it's the umpteenth and straightest port of Daytona 1 but with the very goddamn heart of the experience cut out and the corpse thrown on display for an arm and a leg. Suppose only today's decision makers at Sega would have the balls for brains to believe that what will pass as a slick attraction in 2009 is LESS than what already did 15 years ago.
Useless.
Seriously what happened since April? When the ISC evidently wasn't considered any obstacle to putting out the entire music history of the series in a soundtrack?
I played this again recently (last Friday I went to a town that has the dual monitor cabinet in it's arcade) and believe it or not, my impression is the same as it was back when I played it in Chuck E' Cheese in 1995:
It's a horribly unrealistic racer with slidey cars (did this even HAVE a physics engine!?), a steering wheel that does it's damndest to break your wrists (it actually made me cry and run away from the machine in 1995, only difference Friday was that I had no tears to shed), terrible graphics (I asked my dad back in '95 "why are the tires bumpy?" and he told me about polygon counts, which I didn't understand until a few years later) but an amazingly kickass soundtrack.
Also, bitching course design. Too bad you can't enjoy them with the horrible game mechanics.
Bump for pitiful irony: here in the US, SPEED channel began their 130-odd hours of programming covering the run-up to the Daytona 500; they say this coverage is sponsored by... Sega. The result was plenty of commercials for Aliens vs. Predator and M&S Winter Olympics.
No money for naming rights, but plenty for ad time? Psh...
Although I guess this is the first thing connected to auto racing that Sega has had any sponsorship role in since that 1993 F1 deal with Williams. Or any major sport in a good while that I know of, if you don't count that "Pancrase" thing in Japan around the time of the Shadow game.
Man I remember playing the shit out of Daytona on Saturn, man those were the days, that mountain with a Sonic sculpture on the side is still printed in my brain.
