May 07, 2003

derby owner's club madness?

Since I was wandering around in the Quarter To Three forums when someone asked a question about horse racing computer games (!), I was sufficiently sad to craft the following reply, which I pass on here:

[The sim-like arcade game that someone else mentioned is] ...Sega's "Derby Owner's Club", and they actually had one (complete with massive screen and 8 sit-down terminals) last time I went to Dave and Buster's in the Great Mall, Milpitas, CA (Silicon Valley-ish).

Here's a fan-site for Derby Owner's Club(!) For what it's worth, I watched it for a while, and it seemed rather cool - you buy an (actual physical) smartcard for each horse, which gets saved out with details of how well it's doing, and the gameplay is in deciding how/when to train and feed the horses, deciding default types (late finisher vs. steady runner), and deciding when to whip the horse on during the race. Some of the hardcore players at the Great Mall had card books full of their, uhh, stable. But yes, scary too.

Ohmy, and I just noticed that that fanpage is talking about selling the cards on Ebay. As far as other horse racing games, there's "Stakes Winner" and its sequel on the Neo Geo, though they're kinda basic - the MVS cart goes super-cheap too. "Gallop Racer" for PS2 seems to get decent reviews, in general.

Um, stop looking at me in that weird way, OK? I evidently retain this information for a reason, I just need to work out what that reason is :)

Posted by h0l211 at May 7, 2003 10:25 AM