Desert Road

From Sonic Retro

Desert Road

Fifth & Seventh level, Sonic Drift 2 Level cliché: Wild Wild West cliché

Desert Road is a racecourse in Sonic Drift 2 for the Sega Game Gear. This stage (as "Desert Road 1") is the fifth track of the Purple Chaos GP, after Casino Night and before Iron Ruin; and the races re-enter the region during the White Chaos GP, where "Desert Road 2" is the first track, before Rainy Savanna. In Desert Road 1 (as with most other races in the Chaos Grand Prix), you have to complete three laps of the track to proceed; whereas Desert Road 2 sees you tasked with simply completing a linear course.

Dry, sandy, and hot, Desert Road's towering sand dunes and azure cactai demonstrate that water is an infrequent visitor to the region. Desert Road 1's dunes are large enough to lay track on, and Desert Road 2 sees racers drive through massive tunnels hewn through the sandblasted rocky outcrops.

These tracks (especially the second) are quite twisty-turny, with more than their fair share of hairpin bends, so keep your thumb over the D-pad. On the plus side, there are no obstacles lying in the middle of the road during these tracks.

Sonic Drift 2 makes no unambiguous statements of where in Sonic's world the races are located, but several of the other courses in the Purple and/or White Chaos GP (e.g. Casino Night, Emerald Hill, Hill Top) are set in zones that Sonic and Tails visited during Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (16-bit) - and those were on Westside Island. It is therefore possible that Desert Road lies there too. On the other hand, the course between Desert Road 1 and Desert Road 2 is Iron Ruin, which bears vague resemblance to a ruined Scrap Brain Zone; which was on South Island. Of course, these connections are only circumstantial; Desert Road could easily be somewhere else entirely.