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
There are a myriad of weird little issues all over the place, and when coupled with the fact that the game doesn't explain exactly how to tune a car properly beyond simple "put these wheels on" or "make sure you have a LSD installed" bits on loading screens means the logical idea of upgrading everything you can will have the opposite effect and completely bork your machine -- and take with it the cash you spent upgrading without telling you why you've messed things up or how to fix them. Also, it apparently makes people type in horrid run-on sentences.
It's almost as if the development team got a little too immersed in the scene, tailoring the game to be something that the guys who actually race would enjoy rather than trying to hook newcomers or those of us too broke or out of touch to get into the real-life scene. It's a little weird to have to hit up Wikipedia just to figure out what the hell you're doing wrong, and I still don't know exactly how to properly upgrade a lot of these machines.
There are issues elsewhere, too. The game boasts a soundtrack of a good 30 or so songs, yet offers no option to tweak the offerings as you see fit. The racing HUD, which comes in three flavors that offer increasingly important data like torque, Gs, horsepower and so on, can only be changed by backing all the way out of the game to the main menu. The space allotted for describing upgrades and to apply them is too small. The game gives you the option to attach vinyl stickers for teams you've beaten to get discounts at shops, but buries them at the very end of a few dozen tabs -- including individual tabs for every Tekken and Soulcalibur character Namco has.
If you can actually figure out how to tweak your car, there's no shortage of fun to be had; track-based courses on the Wangan are fun for a while, but often the same courses are recycled a bit too often, and the drive-up battles are nothing like TXR's more stretched-out races. No, the bulk of your enjoyment here is going to be right where the game has always been focused: on the drift battles. With no less than seven different ways to induce a drift, and a more relaxed focus on chaining things together rather than forcing perfect drifts on every corner, there's plenty of room to learn the ins and outs of how different cars handle.
To be honest, I didn't see too much of a difference in how individual cars handled. Switching from MR to FR drive cars produced a very obvious change in how the cars pivoted, but going from one FR car to the next wasn't as obvious. However, because drift battles are fought with relatively low-powered cars (they should top out at about 500 horses or you'll just slam into nearly every wall), a basic knowledge of where the engine is and how handbraking vs. just letting off the gas affects is easier to pick up on than how strong a clutch or LSD you need.
And it's not like all of the options outside races were poorly designed. There were some nice little touches. Every racer has a story, some of them linked with other racers. That the developers thought enough to put a semi-automatic shift system in place, where you need only upshift and the game downshifts for you when braking into hard corners, means that they weren't trying to totally shaft newcomers.
There was a conscious effort, too, to replicate the general feel of the films. Wrapped in twilight, the neon hues of Tokyo and the Bay are well represented here. The framerate for the most part is solid, though there's a bit of jitter that starts to hit during high speeds, and I never was able to figure out if it was just the PS2 doing that odd drop to half resolution that it does every once in a while or just the game trying to simulate a bumpy ride. Either way, it was actually distracting rather than being immersive, and I never did get over it bugging me a little. Oddly enough, the place where the framerate dove the most was in the static shops. I can only guess this was because they were using a higher-poly car models (which do look good), but it didn't happen as often in car showrooms.
I mentioned before that the soundtrack was actually rather sizeable, and it's true. There's a few different styles here; some American alternative rock, some hip-hop (both in English and in Japanese) and j-pop (or, uh, j-pop-punk). Though I could have done without the hip-hop, those tracks were few, and the rest of the stuff was actually pretty enjoyable, a nice mix of import songs I would've never heard and rock tunes that I probably would if I still listened to the local alternative station here in San Fran. And the rest of the audio is good too, but then it'd better be if it was pulled from Universal's recordings. There isn't quite the same pop as some games where the audio is recorded by the developers, but you can still hear turbo hisses and rubber squeals, and the Pro Logic II separation isn't horrid by any stretch.
I feel a little weird writing this review. Most racing games I know I like or not, but here I feel like I'm reviewing a sports sim; there's a very real sense that I either don't get it, or I'm just not into racing enough to understand some of the more nuanced bits of the game. That doesn't mean that I didn't have fun, though, and I'm more than willing to submit that is a fantastic rental. But unless you are into the drift racing scene or you're a gearhead yourself, it may be best to see how much you're willing to research just to properly upgrade things or get into the game.
