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Take to the roads of America and enter the most arduous racing event for top-of-the-range sports cars! Yes indeed! With only your turbo-charged Ferrari Testarossa (top speed: 188mph) and a whingeing (but still pretty well-proportioned) female for company, it's your job to traverse five stages of racing action, dodging other racers and normal traffic in pursuit of the next checkpoint.

In order to confuse the police, the OutRun organisers have erected not one, but five finishing lines, and it's down to you to consider which route provides the least number of pitfalls.

At the top of the screen, you'll notice a timer ticking down. This time won't last you until the end of the race unless you reach the end of the current stage (signified by a checkpoint) and cross the line. Extra time is then doled out, but watch out, because each progressive level endows you with less and less time to complete the next stage!

Complete the game and glory is yours for ever and ever. Fail, and you can expect a good ticking off from your girlfriend - or maybe worse...

At the beginning of the game, you choose which piece of funky musak you wish to accompany your high speed antics. In the selectio, you'll find Magical Sound Shower (Gloria Estefan, eat yer heart out!), Passing Breeze (the cool man's tune), Splash Wave (pretty funky) and finally Step On Beat (a pretty boring tune that actually wan't in the arcade original).

Make no bones about it, Super Monaco GP still rules okay as far as Megadrive driving games go. OutRun may have been more entertaining as a coin-op, but this conversion is marred by the fact that it's a doddle to complete. In Easy mode it took around ten minutes' play to finish it and Normal mode proved to be no more difficult at all.

Only with the higher skill levels did OutRun present any kind of challenge whatsoever, and I'll warrant that that won't last long either. I can't really be bothered to find out either, because OutRun is so dreadfully tedious to play.

The handling of the Testarossa is very dodgy indeed. Touch the side objects at a relatively tiny velocity and you're spun over violently as if you've hit it at a hundred times that speed. I honestly find it sheer lunacy to recommend this game when some shops are selling it for over forty quid.

Fans of the coin-op may enjoy this, but I reckon that most sane, sentient life forms should go for the superior Super Monaco GP or Electronic Arts' smart Road Rash for the best Megadrive road race games.

OutRun might be an old arcade classic, but compared with other Megadrive versions of more up-to-date arcade coin-ops like Super Monaco GP and Super Hang-On, and even non-coin-op race games like Road Rash, it hasn't really got what it takes to be classed as a great race game.

It's just not exciting enough - the sheer uncontrollable speed of Super Hang-On and the constant battle against other cars in Super Monaco GP made them both thrilling games to play.

OutRun has neither of these factors, and when you discover that it's so easy you can finish it on your first go, it all becomes rather dull and pointless. Even on the highest difficulty setting it's still very simply to complete, and only a complete race game novice with the reactions of a crippled slug could find any real challenge.

Yes, the graphics are nice, and yes, the sound is good, but sadly OutRun just isn't challenging enough or fast enough to make it anything other than average.

Presentation 88%
Loads of options and a decent coin-op style attract sequence.

Graphics 80%
Great sprites and backdrops and vibrant colour schemes but a couple of gruesome sprite effects spoil things slightly.

Sound 79%
Not half as good as the arcade's sound, but the tunes are passable enough renditions of the coin-op original. The speech is in there too.

Playability 73%
The Ferrari's handling is a tad bizarre. It doesn't feel like you're playing the coin-op.

Lastability 59%
Very, very easy to complete in all difficulty settings apart from the hardest.

Overall 69%
A pretty good conversion of the coin-op but disappointing overall.