I finally had a bit of time today to dig my wheel out and have a bit of a play around with some racing related stuff, that's been on my to-do list for ages but I've just not got around to because excuses. As well as finally trying out Boomslang's latest Outrun 2 SPDX plugin, I tried out the course editor for FXT.
HOLY ---steaming pile of meadow muffin---!!! Howard, it's absolutely BRILLIANT
and totally intuitive to use
(the only issue I had was nothing to with the Course Editor itself, but getting my Scripts folder to not be read only, which took a bit of finagling with the folder's security). Getting to add in the reverse versions of stages, the dusk and sunset Palm Beach and Sunny Beach stages and mixing up the regular OR2 and SP stages together makes it almost feel like a new game. Incredible! I don't know why Sega never thought to include something like this in the game in the first place as an unlockable bonus or something, it would've extended the game's (already considerable) lastabilty by a huge amount. Also, wonder why they never thought to swap the dusk and night beach stages into the mission modes, rather than just keeping them Time Attack only.
Using a custom stage layout I managed to trigger the Panzer Dragoon bunki animation - that's only the second time I've ever managed to trigger it in all the years I've been playing the game.
I still don't know what the secret to activating this particularly elusive animation is. I'd previously thought you had to get through 2 stages in a row without hitting any cars or coming off the road, but when I activated it this time, I hadn't cleared the previous stage perfectly. On another run, I managed to clear the first five courses without hitting anything or coming off the road and I got the Pegasus bunki animation 4 times in a row after the initial generic green dragon one on the first stage (I've had the same thing happen with Pegasus activating and not the Panzer Dragoon on Outrun Online Arcade when I've got through the first 2 stages perfectly, although that was the version where I activated the PD animation the first time). Weird. The Pegasus animation is also annoyingly bugged in the PC game, when you trigger it, the clippety clop noise of the hooves keeps on looping non stop. I don't know if that's something you could use your tekno-wizardry powers to look into at all would it Howard? Also, just as a suggestion for a future update, would there be any way to swap some of the rarer bunki animations into the arcade version of the game to replace the generic birds? There's an airshp one I've only ever triggered once, no idea how, and there are some others which seem to be exclusive to the time attack (maybe the missions too...?) like the balloons, hang gliders, Jumbo jets, Fighter plane and UFOs. would be awesome to be able to see some of these in the main game instead of the feckin' birds all the time.