I was in the mood to play this again and decided to see how well it'd fit with the Wangan Midnight soundtrack. Pretty good stuff I think! Played from start to finish with no game overs.
Song list:
• Pleasures of Speed
• Fallen Angel
• Daystar
• Never Throw Away
• I'm Here For You
• Nostalgia
• Re-Birth
• Taillight
Highway Star / Rad Racer looks like a take on Outrun at first glance, but it's much less a driving game and far more a dodge the nightmarish traffic kind of game. Any time a lane is open, a car could potentially change lanes to sideswipe you, but only one enemy car can be in a lane at a time, so if there's a car ahead of you in your lane, you know you're safe and don't have to worry about being rammed. Most of the games in the Outrun series have far more passive traffic that doesn't actively try to block you, making it more about the driving rather than actively dealing with rival vehicles.
I recommend keeping your speed during straight sections between 200 and 220 km/h. Any faster and you're risking a crash, especially as there's slow cars that can smash you if you're going much faster than them (there's like 3 that spawn on the right side of stage 5 if the lane is open when you reach them). Note that using your turbo (holding D-Pad Up) hurts your turning on sharp turns so let off the turbo during turns. It can be used to deliberately slide around traffic during a turn though!
Apologies for the jump cut right before the ending 26:51. I fumbled for the key shortcut to pause the music in Winamp and instead pressed the hotkey that cuts OBS's recording, oops. ;w;
There's also a sequel, but Rad Racer 2 is vastly inferior to the first game. The engine sound is worse, and only plays when you have the two songs disabled! It also completely changes how the traffic works, and makes the last two stages brutally hard, lowering the time allotted and requiring memorization of traffic to succeed. You can't push enemy vehicles to speed them up and make them block for you, and you have to memorize where slow vehicles appear that are nearly stopped and will cause you to crash if you hit them. Cars also change lanes far more unpredictably, and will sometimes change lanes when a new car appears. There's also special red vehicles that will aggressively block you faster than you can turn past them, and prevent other cars from spawning when present. Your car's handling is far more sluggish due to introducing inertia. They also did away with the mid-stage color palette changes such as the day to night to day transition in Stage 1, and you're forced to use a new 0 to 255 instant boost mechanic by holding down on the d-pad at the start of levels, because your acceleration without it is awful. The sequel is a hot mess.