I thought I’d try something new this week and do a Sega Saturn game for Random Game Wednesdays. Earlier this year, I did a Genesis game and was disappointed when instead of getting any of the cool games I own, the random number generator gave me Warlock, a licensed game for a movie I had never even heard of. My Saturn collection is quite a bit smaller, but there’s some cool stuff in there like Nights Into Dreams and the first Panzer Dragoon. But of course, instead of getting something like that, the random number generator picked High Velocity: Mountain Racing Challenge.

As the name implies, High Velocity: Mountain Racing Challenge is a game about racing cars in the mountains. There’s three different modes to play, King Attack, Time Trial, and Versus. I wasn’t able to try the versus mode, but did play a little of the other two. I was kind of surprised there wasn’t some kind of Grand Prix mode, something where you would race against several different opponents and progress through different tracks. But let’s see what is here.

I started with King Attack, as it was the first option on the menu. You choose between one of three courses, which are the only courses in the game, and pick a heat. Heats are one on one races against a CPU controlled racer. There’s many heats per course, with half being driven backwards. But that’s kind of it. Each time you complete one of the heats, the option turns red in the menu. I got pretty bored pretty fast, doing the same course multiple times.

And of course, there’s also Time Trial mode. This takes away the other car, but it’s still just driving the same three courses. In these, you do three laps and attempt to get the fastest time possible. You probably already knew exactly what this mode was when you saw what it was called.

On the plus side, the game does look quite nice. The cars are all modeled well and the courses are all convincingly in the mountains. But there’s not much to see. The soundtrack is catchy, but again, there’s not many tracks.

This is a pretty short post, but there’s just not a lot to say about this one. It’s well made for what it is, but there’s just not much here. What is here is also done better in other arcade style racers. I certainly didn’t hate my time with it, but it was pretty boring. This is one you can definitely pass on.