''Cool Riders'' is a

1995 1995 was designated as: * United Nations Year for Tolerance * World Year of Peoples' Commemoration of the Victims of the Second World War This was the first year that the Internet was entirely privatized, with the United States government ...

racing In sports, racing is a competition of speed, in which competitors try to complete a given task in the shortest amount of time. Typically this involves traversing some distance, but it can be any other task involving speed to reach a specific g ...

arcade game An arcade game or coin-op game is a coin-operated entertainment machine typically installed in public businesses such as restaurants, bars and amusement arcades. Most arcade games are presented as primarily game of skill, games of skill and in ...

Sega is a Japanese video game company and subsidiary of Sega Sammy Holdings headquartered in Tokyo. It produces several List of best-selling video game franchises, multi-million-selling game franchises for arcade game, arcades and video game cons ...

. It is the spiritual sequel to ''

OutRunners is a 1993 racing video game developed by Sega AM1 on System 32 Multi hardware. It constitutes the third release in the arcade ''Out Run'' series, after ''Turbo OutRun'' (1989), and was ported to the Sega Genesis home console in 1994. Descripti ...

'' and has a similar premise to it, though rather than driving cars, the player rides bikes. It also uses digitized graphics similar to ''

Mortal Kombat ''Mortal Kombat'' is an American media franchise centered on a series of fighting game, fighting video games originally developed by Midway Games in 1992. The original ''Mortal Kombat (1992 video game), Mortal Kombat'' arcade game spawned Lis ...

''. The Steppenwolf song " Born to Be Wild" is featured as the game's opening theme, as well as one of selectable in-race music. Cool Riders was emulated by the

MAME MAME (formerly an acronym of Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is a free and open-source emulator designed to emulate the hardware of arcade games, video game consoles, old computers and other systems in software on modern personal computers and ...

emulator in 2004, but it wasn't working until 2013. This is because it was the only arcade game on the Sega H1 Board hardware, which used a unique graphics compression scheme.

Gameplay

The object of ''Cool Riders'' is to finish each stage ahead of a computer-controlled rival by the end of a stage's checkpoint and within the allotted time. Whoever finishes first gets to select the next stage. For every rival defeated up to stage four, the player receives a promotion, indicated on the lower left-hand corner of the screen. There are three routes to choose from (westbound and eastbound routes with a middle route that takes the player through the

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

.) There are five stages. The fifth stage is an "Extra Stage" where the object is to outrace all seven computer-controlled rival opponents on the streets of

New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...

to the finish line. Regardless of what happens, the player character's ending will display on a projector if the player had time left over to finish the race, followed by a map containing the route the player took to reach the Extra Stage and the finish line, followed by the word "FINISH" appearing in the center of the screen.

Sonic the Hedgehog is a video game series and media franchise created by the Japanese developers Yuji Naka, Naoto Ohshima, and Hirokazu Yasuhara for Sega. The franchise follows Sonic the Hedgehog (character), Sonic, an anthropomorphic blue hedgehog who battle ...

appears in this game. When the player completes the game, his head and that of Tails are icons for the player's initials in the high score table. The game has

failure Failure is the social concept of not meeting a desirable or intended objective, and is usually viewed as the opposite of success. The criteria for failure depends on context, and may be relative to a particular observer or belief system. On ...

animations when the player runs out of time during a race and comes to a complete stop. The announcer says the same "game over" message as in ''

'': "I'm sorry. You didn't make it." When this happens, mini-cutscenes depending on the character the player chose play, ranging from one character throwing a tantrum on a scooter to characters being carried or thrown off the screen, followed by a map showing the route the player took with the word "RETIRE" appearing in the center of the screen.

Reception

In Japan, ''Game Machine'' listed ''Cool Riders'' on their July 15, 1995 issue as being the seventh most-successful dedicated arcade game of the month. A critic for ''

Next Generation Next Generation or Next-Generation may refer to: Publications and literature * ''Next Generation'' (magazine), video game magazine that was made by the now defunct Imagine Media publishing company * Next Generation poets (2004), list of young ...

'' panned the game, commenting that "Realism is ridiculously absent, a sense of speed is almost nil, and control is plain sloppy; you practically have three directions, straight, and a left and right turn at 45 degrees. With games like ''

Cyber Cycles is a racing arcade game that was released by Namco in 1995. It runs on their System 22 hardware, and allows up to four people to play it simultaneously when two 2-player cabinets are linked together. Gameplay Players must choose one of three d ...

'' eating up players' quarters, ''Cool Riders'' is just not up to par." He gave it two out of five stars.

References

External links

* {{OutRun series 1995 video games Racing video games Motorcycle video games Sega arcade games Arcade video games Arcade-only video games Video games developed in Japan Video games scored by Hiroshi Kawaguchi Multiplayer and single-player video games Video games with digitized sprites