My Daytona USA CCE review: Or how the Sega Saturn's first racer received a makeover one year later, and still sucked.
In the arcades Daytona had pretty good if not great handling and was a nice if not spectacular looking racer but on the Saturn all element of fun is lost through this shoddy conversation. Although CCE features some extra cars and two newly produced tracks, the new vehicles turn out to be mostly pointless and the environments still look as bad as they ever did. Most importantly though is that the game still feels rubbish to play, the collision detection makes a game like Ridge Racer look realistic and most 8-bit racing games had better car physiques. Also, despite being an annoying experience from start to finish, the game is relatively easy and all tracks can be won with the default car on the normal difficulty setting. This pretty much makes using any of the faster cars redundant, unless of course you want to enter the time trial mode, but that is highly doubtful as you will probably be bored before you have won all the races.
Daytona USA CCE doesn’t seem to feature many graphical improvements either, there is still a hideous amount of pop up and the menus even seem to have been downgraded from the slick presentation of the last game to a now dull sequence of text filled screens. The audio is pretty much the same with the addition of a few new music tracks that aren't as good as those in Sega Rally but they aren’t that bad either.
I picked this game up for ninety nine pence on ebay and was still disappointed. Sega did improve the series on consoles with a Dreamcast version a few years back but then all that did was show up how truly awful a misstep the company made here. Daytona was fun in the arcade but it is a very dull title on the Saturn.