The Fast and the Furious
Sure, you can rip up the Wangan, just make sure you're done your homework first.
Published: October 1, 2006
One of the reasons why I dig racing games so much is that they're a heavy dose of fantasy fulfillment -- at least the good ones are. Sims like Gran Turismo 4 let me be a gearhead without having a encyclopedic knowledge of carburetors and cam shafts, while more arcade racers like Ridge Racer let me just tear around tracks in powerslide mode. Somewhere in between are games like Tokyo Xtreme Racer, real cars (or in the case of the earlier TXR games, look-alikes), some basic upgrade options, but a decidedly arcade-like driving experience.
All three types of games have their place, and I love them all equally, but there's been one area that's been largely overlooked, or only passingly touched upon on most racing games: the Japanese art of drift racing. And it is art, a delicate dance on the fringe of control that represents a true paradigm shift in how racing is done. Less about arriving to the finish line ahead of the other guy and more about showing him up on the way there, drift battles were born in the mountains of Japan, and have since started to creep out into the racing scene at large.
It even filtered down to Hollywood, becoming (most prominently) the third entry into the whole Fast and the Furious franchise dubbed Tokyo Drift. Originally, Namco has intended to use the full The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift title, and had given the project to Genki, who were the kings of the Japanese quasi-sim after all those TXR games. For whatever reason, the partnership dissolved and Namco dropped Genki in favor of Eutechnyx, who had at least a little experience with street racing and the culture with Street Racing Syndicate.
The result is this: the Tokyo Drift-free version of FatF still shares the basic world with the movies, but it's probably a very different game than the Genki one would have been, and it's far, far better than you'd expect a racer from the guys who did Big Mutha Truckers to be. Both highway battles and mountainside drift competitions are here, represented equally (though the latter is definitely the focus here), and a level of respect and attention to detail in carrying over the street racing scene that's never been seen before. It's a racing game for the hardcore, and, unfortunately, is a little too hardcore for its own good at times.
FatF does a wonderful job of allowing you to jump into either a Japanese Domestic Market tuner car or an American muscle car and just rip it up however you please on the neon-bathed highways of Tokyo Bay, the Wangan. There are even limited highway battles initiated by riding up behind someone and flashing your high beams at 'em before taking off. The meat of the game, though, is in hotspots set up for destination battles (where the first to the finish wins) and high speed races (whoever goes fastest before the finish wins) around the Bay, or drift (style) and grip (speed) races in the mountains.
All of this was covered extensively in our hands-on preview a few weeks ago, and at the risk of sounding lazy, I'd suggest hitting that link and reading up rather than having to go back over everything here in the review. Besides, I'd rather spend a little time harping on some of the issues I had with the game as well as praising what it does well, without wasting another 1000 words.
All three types of games have their place, and I love them all equally, but there's been one area that's been largely overlooked, or only passingly touched upon on most racing games: the Japanese art of drift racing. And it is art, a delicate dance on the fringe of control that represents a true paradigm shift in how racing is done. Less about arriving to the finish line ahead of the other guy and more about showing him up on the way there, drift battles were born in the mountains of Japan, and have since started to creep out into the racing scene at large.
It even filtered down to Hollywood, becoming (most prominently) the third entry into the whole Fast and the Furious franchise dubbed Tokyo Drift. Originally, Namco has intended to use the full The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift title, and had given the project to Genki, who were the kings of the Japanese quasi-sim after all those TXR games. For whatever reason, the partnership dissolved and Namco dropped Genki in favor of Eutechnyx, who had at least a little experience with street racing and the culture with Street Racing Syndicate.
The result is this: the Tokyo Drift-free version of FatF still shares the basic world with the movies, but it's probably a very different game than the Genki one would have been, and it's far, far better than you'd expect a racer from the guys who did Big Mutha Truckers to be. Both highway battles and mountainside drift competitions are here, represented equally (though the latter is definitely the focus here), and a level of respect and attention to detail in carrying over the street racing scene that's never been seen before. It's a racing game for the hardcore, and, unfortunately, is a little too hardcore for its own good at times.
FatF does a wonderful job of allowing you to jump into either a Japanese Domestic Market tuner car or an American muscle car and just rip it up however you please on the neon-bathed highways of Tokyo Bay, the Wangan. There are even limited highway battles initiated by riding up behind someone and flashing your high beams at 'em before taking off. The meat of the game, though, is in hotspots set up for destination battles (where the first to the finish wins) and high speed races (whoever goes fastest before the finish wins) around the Bay, or drift (style) and grip (speed) races in the mountains.
All of this was covered extensively in our hands-on preview a few weeks ago, and at the risk of sounding lazy, I'd suggest hitting that link and reading up rather than having to go back over everything here in the review. Besides, I'd rather spend a little time harping on some of the issues I had with the game as well as praising what it does well, without wasting another 1000 words.
