Cruis’n Blast Gets An Update With New Car Changes

While in the process of writing up a review on Cruis’n Blast, I was poking around the Raw Thrills website and discovered that the game had received a new software update back in February of this year. Normally, software updates a few years after a game is released aren’t anything worth writing a post about – bug fixes, oversea language additions, graphics card updates, those sorts of things. Abnormally, as was the case with Cruis’n Blast, it mentioned something else – significant content changes.

This appears to have been triggered by the expiration of the Lamborghini license. For any Cruis’n machine running the 1.27 software and prior, it would have the Lamborghini Aventador available to drive. But for any machine sold from February 2020 and on, the selected vehicles would be a bit different. By what I can tell, this new software (v2.08) is only being applied to units made at the factory; The software is not currently available to buy on the RT website (still showing 1.27).

The company went and changed out five of the eight available vehicles, replacing them with:

• 1959 Corvette
• 1963 Corvette Stingray
• 1959 Cadillac Eldorado
• 2019 Chevy Camaro ZL1
• 2019 Nissan 370Z

As I’m sure you notice there, three are considered to be American classics. Better than just telling you about them and hoping you’ll come across a unit with the update, I also have some screenshots! Thanks to Raw Thrills for passing these along:

One question I am sure will be asked: “Are there new tracks?” The answer appears to be no. Although I would be curious to poll operators out there if Raw Thrills did offer new tracks, how much would you be willing to pay for such content per track? (This is purely to satisfy my own curiosity…no clue if RT would be wanting to do such a thing).

As a note, the update also added “Bonus Pricing,” something that is being added to more RT games, and has also been added to a semi-recent build of Jurassic Park Arcade. This “allows the operator to give free additional credits when a certain amount of money is put in (e.g. $1 / 1 play, $2 / 3 plays),” something that used to be more common among video games and is still used in pinball today.

What do you think of this new update? Do you think that Raw Thrills made good trades on the cars?