A little over a month ago I had the opportunity to visit Specular Interactive’s offices in Irvine, CA and I got some hands-on time with their follow-up to H2Overdrive, Dirty Drivin’. Now Raw Thrills has added the game to their website (Specular developed it, Raw Thrills is publishing it with some touches of their own) and as you can see from the graphic above, they have made a couple of changes to that cabinet that I didn’t see there.
The most obvious change is the crank. In previous versions this had been a large crank connected to the right-side of the seat. It is now a dashboard crank, not too much unlike throttle controllers on some other racers but with the skull. I’m not sure how I feel about this change yet as I enjoyed how the crank was setup previously but I would have to try it out this way to see if it’s same/better/worse. At this point I am thinking it would nice if the side-crank was offered as an option for operators willing to pay more for that sort of thing.
The second difference is the screen. It’s the same size (42″) but the RT website says that it’s a 1080p monitor, which is higher rez than what I had seen at Specular, which was 1336×768 (same as H2Overdrive). I can’t complain about a higher resolution, especially where the game runs at 60fps. Aside from those two things it should be the same game I got some hands on time with.
Dirty Drivin’ will be at IAAPA next month and it is available now for venues to purchase although what the MSRP happens to be, I don’t know. I imagine it will be close to H2Overdrive which sold for between $7000-$8000 a unit.
“Yank the-” hey, waitaminute!
Hopefully they’ll still have both versions available. It’s a silly thing but the side crank gave the game more personality!
Our sources claim there have been a lot of changes made to suit operators needs following LocTest – the shifter changed to allow access to the game from both sides – the monster foot pedal went for price issues – and there has been some changes to the dashboard cluster of lights.
I intensively played the game at EAS’11 so that I could get up to speed on the play style and issues of claims that the graphics pallet being too dark in some areas. All in all this is a driver aimed at the Raw Thrills / Play Mechanix player focus.
I have an issue with the need for intense player racing – and how many operators will have a four machine set-up – giving the game its best presentation.
Yeah, it was a bit dark, like in parts of the coliseum.
D&B should pick up on this if they haven’t already. It’s more fun than Mario Kart GP2 and FatF.