I recently took the time to gather all of my Daytona USA footage from Boss Battle Games, and I now have all of this presented in an entry on my site, GemuBaka. I'm probably not quite 100% done with this game as it pertains to media (running on the Expert track and diving even deeper into the SEGA Saturn port stick out in mind), but this is at least a launching pad into discussing some notes and my personal history on the game.
"SEGA’s Daytona USA was something we unfortunately ignored during its time. It largely existed to make everyone laugh and sing along with the “Daytonaaaaaaaaaaa!” that would seemingly loop infinitely, as no one really ever played the game at our Namco-owned mall arcade location. I never put a lot of time into arcade racers over the years, so the vast majority of my experiences on the game came as a result of the SEGA Saturn version I wouldn’t even have a chance to play until 2001 – a good seven years after the release of the original arcade game.
"I didn’t grow up around large arcade locations. Space was a precious commodity at most any location in my area, so, at best, we had the occasional racing machine such as Cruisin’ USA trickle through our arcades.
"Sitting down with Daytona USA on the SEGA Saturn was nice, as I’ll fully admit I’ve been a person who has always hated playing SEGA’s Virtua Racing. The presentation is very '1990s,' and on the Saturn the game still looked and sounded great. There are a handful of secrets to uncover – most importantly in taking the horse to the sponsorship sign – but at the end of the day, the track list and overall options were limited for the game.
"It turns out the missing ingredient was in having other humans to play this game with."
I'll leave everyone with one of the videos directly accessible from this chost: A series of multiplayer matches (6-7 players) on the advanced track. I’ve yet to learn the balance between shifting low to navigate curves on the advanced track, while at the same time not sacrificing a lot of speed in order to hit the checkpoints. This gets even more complicated when multiple racers are actively trying to ruin your progress!