3D Super Hang-On

Whether you played it on the Mega Drive, through an emulator, or squatting on a greasy toy motorbike at the arcade, you've almost certainly had a go Sega's Super Hang-On at some point.

But just in case you missed it, Super Hang-On is a motorbike racing game that has you snaking around corners, bashing into other bikes, and headplanting into signposts at 324km/h.

You'll spend most of your time whizzing past your rivals while checking the signposts in the background for signals to hang a left or a right. How you hang on is up to you - can you make that corner with your turbo or should you slow down and risk being overtaken?

The question is, why should you bother shelling out almost a fiver for the same old game? Well, this isn't just a cheap and nasty Virtual Console port. This is a remastering.

The developer of this version, M2, has been remaking and porting games for the last 20 years, becoming well-known among retro enthusiasts for its attention to detail and extra features. This version is no exception.

There are five courses in total: Beginner (six stages in Africa), Junior (ten stages in Asia), Senior (14 stages in the Americas), Expert (18 stages in Europe), and the all-new unlockable World Course (all 48 stages).

You can also choose between the Mini Ride-On and Sit Down versions of the game, each with slightly different difficulties and stages.

The primary new experience to be found in this remastering of the game is the gyro control option, which allows you to steer your bike using the 3DS unit itself.

Combine this with the Moving Cabinet mode, which perfectly syncs the screen's rotation to your movement, and're likely to find yourself thoroughly absorbed in each race. However, The 3D mode is best experienced with the widescreen view without the gyro option on.

The slew of options available allows you to tweak the experience to your liking. You can customise your control layout, select from four screen sizes that mimic your distance from the screen as if you were in an arcade, muck about with the music equaliser, and max out the sound to the point that you can feel the rumble of the bikes you pass from your 3DS vibrating.

You can also change the difficulty down to an incredibly forgiving level where you no longer collide with other bikes, and you can increase or decrease the time limit. Considering you can save your progress at any point in the race and even resume from the last stage you were on if you time out, you have almost no excuse for not finishing the game.

I had never finished the Expert course before this version. Even so, the difficulty settings don't mean you can just mindlessly saunter through - instead, they help you learn the basics of braking, decelerating, and deploying the turbo.

In terms of replayability, lap times are saved for each stage, but I can't see many replaying the game endlessly to shave a few seconds off, as you might be tempted to do in Mario Kart, where there are distractions beyond simply going fast, or Gran Turismo, where going fast is refined to an art form.

M2 really has gone above and beyond to make this the best, most complete version of Super Hang-On. However, it's not a timeless experience. Nostalgic fans of the original will enjoy it, but younger players accustomed to slicker offerings may wonder what all the fuss is about.