Tokyo Xtreme Racer DRIFT
Kaido Battle finally arrives on US shores, and at an irresistible price.
Published: April 30, 2006
I love me some Tokyo Xtreme Racer. Genki's racing games may not have been especially deep, but the progression of increasingly more powerful cars and ways to supe them up and add some customization, a free-roaming network of Tokyo highways to explore, and a simple but effective system for creating something of a life bar for you and your opponents made the game almost like a driving RPG.
But there's a problem: after five games (two of them on the Dreamcast, two on the PS2 and even a scaled-down PSP version), the formula is starting to get stale, and it needs a little injection of something new.
Enter TXR Drift, which swaps out the flat stretches of highway for snaking, meandering Japanese mountain roads and finally pulls the game off the car-on-a-pole physics that have been something of a hallmark. Instead, drift racing has replaced things, and the same risk vs. reward scenario of throwing your car into near-sideways slides around corners without touching the walls or barriers of the road that made the drift portions of Need for Speed Underground so damn fun is here, but bettered.
That's not to say the familiar Spirit Points system of trying to pull ahead of your rival enough to drop their life gauge isn't present, it's just balanced against drift (or Corner Artist) races and time trials (and, in some cases, both of the latter two at once). It's the exact kind of injection of new elements the series needed, and for some inexplicable reason, Crave is practically giving the game away at only $20. Seriously, if you've played the previous games in the past and liked them, stop reading and go pick up a copy; it's that fun.
For those that haven't played the previous games... well, congrats, you're missing nothing coming into this game. DRIFT is different enough that it doesn't really build on all but the most basic premise of the previous games, which are the aforementioned SP battles and buying new cars and upgrading them with new parts. The introduction of officially licensed equipment (and sponsors) means you can trick out your ride with new shocks, transmission, rims, wheels, clutch, a limited slip differential, intercooler, turbo or NA-tuned upgrade, muffler, aero parts like a spoiler, air cleaner and so on.
More importantly, these parts can all be tweaked after purchse, and in a lot of cases picking the right kind of tires and making small tweaks to the engine make a huge difference in rain or snow or even going up or down the mountain. This is a game for gearheads, and sadly it also means you'll have to be one or have a friend nearby (be it an online encyclopedia or real live human) to explain what some of the stuff like gear ratios and LSD actually do, since the game sure as hell won't give you a clue. GT4 this is not.
It's also plagued with scads of loading screens. Just getting into races can saddle you with two or three screens of at least 10 seconds each, and while that seems like a small number it can add up to hours lost if you play the game long enough. It's certainly enough for minutes by the time you've progressed to the second mountain course. With four major mountain paths (Hakone, Nikko, Haruna and Rokka), and loading screens crammed between the necessary options for loading out your car to accommodate the conditions of the track on a given day, it becomes a chore just to get to the races.
But there's a problem: after five games (two of them on the Dreamcast, two on the PS2 and even a scaled-down PSP version), the formula is starting to get stale, and it needs a little injection of something new.
Enter TXR Drift, which swaps out the flat stretches of highway for snaking, meandering Japanese mountain roads and finally pulls the game off the car-on-a-pole physics that have been something of a hallmark. Instead, drift racing has replaced things, and the same risk vs. reward scenario of throwing your car into near-sideways slides around corners without touching the walls or barriers of the road that made the drift portions of Need for Speed Underground so damn fun is here, but bettered.
That's not to say the familiar Spirit Points system of trying to pull ahead of your rival enough to drop their life gauge isn't present, it's just balanced against drift (or Corner Artist) races and time trials (and, in some cases, both of the latter two at once). It's the exact kind of injection of new elements the series needed, and for some inexplicable reason, Crave is practically giving the game away at only $20. Seriously, if you've played the previous games in the past and liked them, stop reading and go pick up a copy; it's that fun.
For those that haven't played the previous games... well, congrats, you're missing nothing coming into this game. DRIFT is different enough that it doesn't really build on all but the most basic premise of the previous games, which are the aforementioned SP battles and buying new cars and upgrading them with new parts. The introduction of officially licensed equipment (and sponsors) means you can trick out your ride with new shocks, transmission, rims, wheels, clutch, a limited slip differential, intercooler, turbo or NA-tuned upgrade, muffler, aero parts like a spoiler, air cleaner and so on.
More importantly, these parts can all be tweaked after purchse, and in a lot of cases picking the right kind of tires and making small tweaks to the engine make a huge difference in rain or snow or even going up or down the mountain. This is a game for gearheads, and sadly it also means you'll have to be one or have a friend nearby (be it an online encyclopedia or real live human) to explain what some of the stuff like gear ratios and LSD actually do, since the game sure as hell won't give you a clue. GT4 this is not.
It's also plagued with scads of loading screens. Just getting into races can saddle you with two or three screens of at least 10 seconds each, and while that seems like a small number it can add up to hours lost if you play the game long enough. It's certainly enough for minutes by the time you've progressed to the second mountain course. With four major mountain paths (Hakone, Nikko, Haruna and Rokka), and loading screens crammed between the necessary options for loading out your car to accommodate the conditions of the track on a given day, it becomes a chore just to get to the races.
