Great port of the ARCADE version, but veterans of the home conversion(s) will miss the extras.
Though this is the first version that is really trying to bring the arcade experience home 100% intact, it's hard not to review this Daytona USA without harkening back to the home ports that came before it. This may be the one and only conversion to boast HD and widescreen graphics, and they give the Model 2 textures of 1993 a nice fresh sheen, but that wow factor doesn't last long, especially when pop-up is still rearing its ugly head. It's not nearly as bad as it was in the 1993 original, but it shouldn't be here AT ALL...the 10-year-old DC version had almost none. It's also the first version to boast a challenge mode, but that almost serves as a tutorial more than a true challenge mode; most Daytona veterans will have little to no trouble blowing through 90% or more of them on their first or second attempts.
Survival mode forces you to actually use the pit stops, as your tires wear down throughout the race, and that does add some depth to the racing, but it's still not that great an addition. Kareoke mode is more silly than anything else.
So once you get past the extras, you're pretty much left with what this release was going for: the original arcade experience, with a HD, widescreen coat of paint. And there's a reason that such a core has endured as long as it has: it's a terrific, well-executed experience, a true reckoning back to the days of easy-to-learn, harder-to-master gameplay, where once you quickly got the basics down, mastering the subtleties kept you coming back again. And again. And again.
But it won't be long before you'll miss what previous home conversions offered to keep things fresh for the long-term. Being stuck with only the original Hornets is tough. The seminal Saturn port offered several variations on the Hornet in its Saturn Mode, complete with different accelerations, top speeds, and handling characteristics. The CCE edition offered different cars entirely, as did the Dreamcast version. The DC version also allowed you to mess around with its various car's color schemes. Though I quickly disgarded the CCE version as rubbish, having different cars to experiment with in both the Saturn AND DC versions gave both of those ports a lot of longevity. Some may miss the extra tracks of CCE and DC Daytona, but none of them really measured up to the three originals, so I'm not that sorry to see them go. But no matter how much I try to get past it, being stuck with two cars that I can't customize one bit is hard to take.
So the answer to the $1,000,000 question, of whether a pure arcade port of Daytona is a good thing...I'd have to say, sort of. Once you get the controls down, it feels much like the arcade version. It looks like the arcade version, only better. And its core racing experience is enough to keep you coming back for a while. But not offering what every home version provided before it - more cars - seems like a travesty. If they can put it a challenge and survival mode, would it have been that difficult to at least include some more cars? Even if they were just more Hornets with different characteristics?
Still great arcade racing after 18 years...no small feat, but I just wish there was a little more.