Games 423-424: Champion Boxing & Hang-On

Sega's legendary designer Yu Suzuki's wrote his first game for Sega's not-so-legendary SG-1000 console, a contemporary of the Famicom with the graphical prowess of the ColecoVision. Retrospectives tend to consider the later Master System as Sega's true answer to the Famicom, and reduce the SG-1000's role to its forebear if it is even acknowledged at all, and truth be told, I don't see myself exploring the SG-1000 library much either. No whales originated on it, but this ancestor is a rare opportunity to emulate it.

Game 423: Champion Boxing

"B" and I played a few matches in MAME and recorded our last and probably most exciting one, in which he plays the taller boxer and wins by decision.

 

The game is a bit simplistic, but overall it's not bad! The controls have a strange design choice where button 1 punches and button 2 cycles between punch types (jab, straight, uppercut), but they're fast and responsive, and the animations are fluid and readable. Action tends to oscillate between attack and defense; land a hit and you're in a good position to follow up with another, but you've got to mix up your punches with high and low blows to keep him guessing how to block. Block successfully and your next blow will come out faster than his, making the ideal opportunity for a counter-offensive. Or, if you just can't seem to block your opponent's string of punches, you can back off and leave him swinging at air, forcing him to come to you while you take a breather. The strategy isn't by any means deep, but it's something.

GAB rating: Above average. Like Urban Champion but better, I enjoyed this sparring match more than I expected to.

Game 424: Hang-On

Sega's arcade ventures are well known for being early adopters of pseudo-3D and eventually 3D technologies, often relying on bespoke, pricey hardware, but some of their earliest attempts don't hold up terribly well. Turbo, for instance, powered by the sprite-scaling VCO Object board, plays awkwardly and looks primitive compared to Namco's Pole Position from just a few months later, and Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom looks flashy but is otherwise a chaotic mess.

Enter the famous Super Scaler board, or at least a progenitor to it - a 16-chip, dual-CPU beast designed for one purpose - to one-up Pole Position (itself a monster of a PCB). Truth be told, considering Hang-On is three years younger, the improvement is almost underwhelming, but it goes to show how much arcade technology stagnated in the interim years between 1982 and 1985. But make no mistake, it succeeds at this goal; Hang-On's 3D perspective is just as convincing as Pole Position's, but runs smoother, speedier, and is much more colorful than anything before it, and the technology would only get better.

Photo by SegaRetro

Nearly as important to the graphics technology are the cabinet externals, which feature analog bike handlebars for steering, a twist throttle, and braking lever. The deluxe ride-on model, shaped like one of the ingame motorcycles, goes even further for immersion and is controlled by tilting the assembly with your whole body weight - an impressive feature all but impractical to emulate! ACAM of New Hampshire has such a model, but it remains inoperable, sadly.

To emulate this as best as I could, I brought out my Logitech steering wheel and pedals, which probably allows easier control than the real thing did. My wheel would steer, my gas pedal would throttle, but I mapped one of the paddle shifters to the brakes. You need analog throttle, but you don't really need analog braking.

And, it works! It works quite well - this is easily the nicest-feeling arcade racing game I've covered yet - much is because unlike Turbo and Pole Position which use free-spinning, centerless wheels, I can comfortably map Hang-On's steering to a standard wheel, but the action feels responsive, sufficiently weighty, and fast. Sliding through a hairpin turn at just the right speed so that you don't understeer and drive off the road feels great, and even better if you pass another biker or two mid-turn.

Granted, this is still the Turbo-mode of gameplay and pseudo-3D physics, where the road is flat, turning is an illusion, and rival bikers are mere obstacles to be passed rather than true opponents. But a good illusion goes a long way in an arcade racer, and this is the best illusion of turning yet.

Hang-On is intensely unforgiving - you cannot afford a single accident if you hope to get through to the end, and even if you never crash or bump into another rider and spend most of your ride at maximum throttle, you can still lose because you took turns too cautiously, or even because a road segment was congested with bikers and forced you to wait for an opportunity to pass. Luck, in the form of the bikers and when you encounter them, plays a role - they can be easy to pass, risky to pass, or impossible depending on when you reach them, how many there are, and whether they're off to the sides or actively changing lanes at the time. Many of my attempts were doomed by a rival bumping me off the road and into a rose bush or a signpost as I futilely tried to pass him.

I'd say it took me at least 30 tries to get through the entire course for the first time, and I made it twice - the second time is shown in the recording. A crash flings you from the bike which dramatically explodes in the background and effectively costs you eleven seconds - five to recover, and six to get back up to speed - and both of my successful runs were accident-free and finished with fewer than ten seconds remaining.

Both runs also involved a hidden secret; one that requires me to describe the runs as "accident-free" rather than "crash-free." During the fourth leg of the race, you'll eventually see a Sega logo on the left curb, followed by H-A-N-G-O-N letters. Crash into the 'G,' which is rather easy to accidentally swerve around instead of into, and you'll put twenty seconds back on the clock. Without exploiting this secret, both of my successes would have been failures.

GAB rating: Good. Hang-On is a Sega milestone, marking the start of their long-reigning position at the forefront of the coin-op scene's cutting edge. While the driving isn't obviously more advanced than Turbo, or even Atari's Night Driver, presentation and feel makes it fun.