Re-release this: Neo Drift Out: New Technology

Neo Geo Arcade Archives has come and gone without Neo Drift Out getting a re-release.

This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

The Drift Out series existed back in the 90s in arcades and on the Super Famicom, and then sort of just vanished following a 1996 entry on the Neo Geo. Which is weird, because said Neo Geo entry was a fun rally racer that approached things in an uncommon way. While there were other racers on the track you had to account for, you weren’t racing to get to the finish line ahead of them. No, this was more like an Excitebike scenario, where the goal was to best the top-posted times, but so long as you didn’t run down the clock, you could still move on to the next course. That’s the rub, though: to pass the finish line in time, never mind to do so at the top of the rankings, will require some perfect drifting, turning, and a knowledge of the shortcuts on each track. Which is to say, it’s not just a thing you’re going to do the first time you play.

Neo Drift Out: New Technology ditches the direct overhead rally racing of its predecessors, and goes for an angled, isometric view instead. The cars are larger, everything is more detailed, and it feels great to control thanks to the simple to play, tough to master control scheme. Pulling left on the joystick turns the car left; pushing right turns it to the right. The A button is for accelerating, B for braking: that’s it. What will take time is figuring out exactly how much pressure to apply on turns to nail them in the quickest, most efficient way possible, when you should let up on the gas, or when a quick tap of the brake will work better.

It’s this mastering of the game’s ins and outs that’ll take time: the actual tracks available certainly will not. There’s a very short practice track used simply to let you mess with the controls for literally seconds, and then six real race tracks, which take so little time once you’re firing on all cylinders that various playthrough videos of Neo Drift Out take a little over 12 minutes to show the entire game.

Good luck getting to that point, though. In order to post the fastest times, you’ll need to avoid basically all instances where your car slows down for a reason other than you purposefully doing so in order to nail a turn without fishtailing or crashing, and there are quite a few obstacles to contend with that’ll make this difficult. Barrels, cones, puddles, ice, other cars, boulders — these will all get in your way, and either slow you down a bit and force you to get your speed back up, costing you fractions of seconds here and there, or, in the case of something like the boulder, clipping it will send you spiraling out of control. Which is also bad for time management, as you can imagine.

You have three cars to choose from, all by Japanese manufacturers. There’s the Toyota Celica, the fastest of the three cars that controls worse than the other two and doesn’t have as strong of a car body. There’s the Subaru Impreza, which gives equal weight to all three of those categories. And the Mitsubishi Lancer, which drives the slowest of the trio but gives you maximum control and body. You should give all three a try to see what suits your style of play the best — I spent a lot of time with the Celica to force me to learn the nuances of controlling the car around corners, while also being able to ramp up speed in a hurry, but you can’t really go wrong with any of the three.

While the view is fairly zoomed in — that’s how you get the large car sprite in the first place — Neo Drift out compensates for this by telling you what’s coming. To a degree, anyway: there’s no map, nor warnings about specific obstacles other than boulders being… somewhere in front of you… but before each turn, you’ll get a voice clip and a turn sign on the screen showing you what’s coming soon. So, if you’ve got a basic left turn coming, you’ll see a sign that shows that. If you’ve got a right turn that includes a little zig halfway through, you’ll get a sign showing that. And if you’ve got a left turn that becomes a right turn that swerves sharply back into a left turn before heading off straight again, then you’ll see that. Some turns are simple enough that knowing it’s coming is basically all you need to nail it, while others, like the multi-step last example above, require both knowing and the skill to do something about it. Sometimes, on the more complicated turns, knowing in advance before you’ve mastered the controls will mostly just let you count how many times you’re going to go flying off course in a row.

That’s where practice comes in, however. And Neo Drift Out required quarters in the arcade to try again, sure, but you don’t have to deal with that while emulating it. Just “insert” another credit, and try the course again. Given enough time, you’ll be memorizing turns, as well as which shortcuts are worth taking and which you should avoid. Shortcut opportunities also show up as a warning sign on your screen, with the two paths you could take shown. The one that’s blocked off with cones is the one you weren’t supposed to take, but sometimes… well, imagine an elongated stretch of road heading to the right that loops back above after a left turn. Sometimes, a shortcut might come out of nowhere, blocked off with cones, that lets you skip the elongated part before the turn and just smash through the middle. Those kinds of moments can shave full seconds off of your time, which is no small thing! There are shortcuts that might not suit your style of driving, too, so learning which ones not to take becomes important as well.

Each of the first five tracks has a checkpoint around the midpoint, and getting there before time runs out is the goal. The time extension isn’t particularly generous, which makes the second half of each track more difficult even if you don’t find the actual track layout tougher: this makes thriving in the pre-checkpoint sections vital for achieving the top time. While failure to reach the checkpoint before time expires will mean an instant game over, after the checkpoint, the clock will just run down, switch to negative, and keep running until you reach the finish in order to show you how much slower you were than you needed to be. The sixth and final track actually has two checkpoints, and you’re going to need to hit both with time to spare to make it to the very end.

In addition to the single player mode, there’s also a competitive two-player mode. While the solo experience does feature some intelligent computer-driven cars, it’s hard to beat the unpredictability of the real thing. At least the game is plenty fun on your own if you can’t find a second, or whatever setup you’re playing on won’t allow for one.

There’s not much of a difference between each track in terms of meaningful presentation, at least in terms of how it impacts the actual races. Some have more dirt than others, some have more grass. Sometimes it’s wetter, sometimes drier. The fifth track is pure evil, though, since it takes place in a snow-covered location that’s also got ice to worry about. You’re going to slip and slide, a lot, especially if you’re using the Celica. Otherwise, the visual differences in tracks are mostly aesthetic, but sometimes that doesn’t make a lot of sense, either. The Africa track, for instance, shows the starting line surrounded by a cheering crowd of people dressed to make you think this is taking place well outside of the city and near a tribal village. (Game developers loved making this decision to visually show that it was Africa in the 90s, or it was the only idea they had.) For some reason, though, this same crowd is there in the Great Britain track. Weird, given how the developers were really trying to emphasize location with their choice of attire.

The crowds barely factor into anything, though, since you just seem them for a blip while you wait for the race to begin. And the quality of the tracks themselves is high regardless of the sameness of some of the visual presentation, with more asked of you in each subsequent race again and again until that final one hits you with, “oh, this is just another checkpoint, not the end like every other course.” Neo Drift Out isn’t the greatest racer in the world, but it’s a damn fine arcade rally racer, and again, it’s surprising that the series just disappeared following this entry in it, considering.

It also hasn’t seen a revival or re-release anywhere, outside of the Neo Geo CD release that arrived the same year the game came out in arcades worldwide. The Neo Geo line of Arcade Archives releases didn’t include Neo Drift Out: New Technology, and neither did the game lists for SNK’s various Neo Geo minis. It’s especially odd given that SNK published the arcade edition abroad, so it’s not like they lacked some kind of stake in it, and it’s not a racer that required a steering wheel or anything of the sort and therefore needed some extra conversion work done. It was controlled with a joystick in the arcade instead, and had a Neo Geo CD home version in Japan, as well. It plays well with an arcade stick, joystick, or even a directional pad, and is a good time on a large TV or even a small portable device, and yet, it’s just kind of lost to history since it wasn’t deemed worthy of an Arcade Archives or mini compilation release.

The works of Visco Corporation have mostly disappeared, though, so it’s not like Neo Drift Out is alone in this. Vasara and its sequel have been re-released in the present in the Vasara Collection, and Andro Dunos received a sequel (from another developer and publisher) in 2022. Battle Flip Shot, though? Nothing, and the same goes for its sequel. Taito hasn’t bothered re-releasing the games they published that Visco developed in the same way they have with other devs they contracted. Visco isn’t a legend or anything, but it’s still odd that they’ve just been mostly memory holed outside of a pair of vertical shoot ‘em ups, especially when quality games like Neo Drift Out would be enjoyed in the present, if only people were given the chance to do so.

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