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Outrun Europa on the Spectrum - Where's my colours?

SozzlyJoe

By SozzlyJoe
in Retro & Arcade Gaming

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SozzlyJoe

SozzlyJoe

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The more I look at the two especially side by side I just don't see it. Even with a touch up on the Speccy graphics the two just aren't the same. Look at the sills on the house windows, the shape of the car.

Oh absolutely. My speculation - Probe were developing this in colour, but it looked like a dogs breakfast, so they removed it at a late stage. Meanwhile they sent YS some bullshots and YS invented a review based around them. It's simple and it fits.

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Ginola Bear

Ginola Bear

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I posted about this over on World of Spectrum a bit back. Repeated below, for those of you interested in the mystery surrounding the game.

I know a bit about this as I interviewed the game's developer last year. Retro Gamer magazine expressed an interest in running a feature in the mag, about the mystery surrounding the 'colour' version of OutRun Europa, so I've been sitting on it ever since.
I will have a word with the editor, Darran, to see if he's still interested in running that feature. If not, I'll post the interview here or something.
Many of you have guessed what happened. In short, the in-game graphics were going to be colour. The coder developed a converter which grabbed the graphics from the Master System verion. This worked quite nicely for the CPC version, which was completed first, but when he moved onto the ZX version, there was lots of ugly clashing which needed fixing. Unfortunately, the project was already late and there wasn't enough time to fix the graphics. So he reluctantly switched them to monochrome at the last minute.
The Your Sinclair review uses mocked-up grabs of how they hoped the game would look. As for the text of the review, it's mostly guess works as the writer of the review can't even remember what happened! My best guess is that he was instructed to view the CPC version as the ZX version was running late, and if the ZX graphics had been tidied up, as was the plan, it wouldn't look a million miles away from the CPC version.
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SozzlyJoe

SozzlyJoe

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I posted about this over on World of Spectrum a bit back. Repeated below, for those of you interested in the mystery surrounding the game.

Thanks for that. It hinges more on incompetence rather than malice then, so it definitely has a better ring of truth to it compared to my speculation. The Master System graphics converter is a fascinating detail.

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Anne Summers

Anne Summers

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As for the text of the review, it's mostly guess works as the writer of the review is still to ashamed to admit what happened.

Corrected.

I love YS as much as the next Speccy fan but to believe they ran for as many years as they did without slipping up a few times like this isn't realistic. Think what we know about the cut-throat nature of the games business industry in Britain back then. All the money that was being thrown around on marketing. The shedloads of copies that YS sold. The press and the industry were in bed with each other back then just as much as they are now, the only difference is that we're wise to it these days so they can't be as blatant. As far as I can remember, reviewing unfinished games wasn't anything shocking back then - it was quite a few years later (I think Ace or an Amiga magazine - Amiga Power?) was the first mag I remember taking a moral stance on the issue and saying "We vow to never review an unfinished game".Up until that point it was accepted practice, from what I can see.

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Lorfarius

Lorfarius

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Thing is just go back and look at games that were out. They weren't exactly deep, meaningful affairs and often quite simplistic so it must have been very tempting to just review the preview copies as the final games probably weren't all that different.

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Unofficial Who

Unofficial Who

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Corrected.

I love YS as much as the next Speccy fan but to believe they ran for as many years as they did without slipping up a few times like this isn't realistic. Think what we know about the cut-throat nature of the games business industry in Britain back then. All the money that was being thrown around on marketing. The shedloads of copies that YS sold. The press and the industry were in bed with each other back then just as much as they are now, the only difference is that we're wise to it these days so they can't be as blatant. As far as I can remember, reviewing unfinished games wasn't anything shocking back then - it was quite a few years later (I think Ace or an Amiga magazine - Amiga Power?) was the first mag I remember taking a moral stance on the issue and saying "We vow to never review an unfinished game".Up until that point it was accepted practice, from what I can see.

And even then Amiga Power went back on that three times for their reviews of Super Stardust, Pinball Illusions and Sensible World of Soccer. And that last one got them as the released game was bugged to all hell.

They come clean about it here

As they say at the end of the page after going through each case
There can be no apologies deep enough to excuse these three acts of criminal deception. Jonathan must have been mad, and we were stupid not to stop him. We are all culpable.

In fact, it's a good job we were all brutally slain in AP65. It's no more than we deserved.
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  • 11 months later...
Dimahoo

Dimahoo

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All games scores start at zero.

No but in the Mock up there no score at all. No timer, or anything. seems a bit weird as IIRC the speccy couldn't display scorelines outside its own screen and many games ran on a reduced screen. I can't think of any games off my head that didn't have a scoreline within the game screen which at the time would have made me a bit suspect. No as much as the colour usage though. At best i'd have said a CPC or VGA PC.

VGA was around in 87' and hit the home about a year later i think.

Love the way the new version features an Elite styled proximity locator though :)

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Swainy

Swainy

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No but in the Mock up there no score at all. No timer, or anything. seems a bit weird as IIRC the speccy couldn't display scorelines outside its own screen and many games ran on a reduced screen. I can't think of any games off my head that didn't have a scoreline within the game screen which at the time would have made me a bit suspect. No as much as the colour usage though. At best i'd have said a CPC or VGA PC.

VGA was around in 87' and hit the home about a year later i think.

Love the way the new version features an Elite styled proximity locator though :)

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/showmag.cgi?mag=YourSinclair/Issue71/Pages/YourSinclair7100046.jpg

Take a look at the bottom screen shot on that review. The Elite styled locator was always intended.

There's no doubting that the screens used in the reviews & previews were mocked up. I think that the programmers had the intention of including colour but I think that they ran out of time, which is typical of the time especially seeing as the game was published by US Gold. From what I can tell, the graphics were automatically ported over from the Amstrad version without being tidied up.

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Swainy

Swainy

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As someone that knows nothing about this kind of thing, how is it that you're able to make it look better than the guys who made it?

Are you changing the code but in theory it could still run on the original machine?

No. I'm just editing the graphics. The engine used was capable of these graphics, however the development team didn't spend the time needed to clean the graphics up after automatically transferring them from the Master System version.

So this is exactly the same code. I've just used a utility to that allows me to access the graphics and edit them.

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