Street Supremacy
Genki proves you can port the streets of Tokyo to the PSP, but not without some sacrifices.
Published: March 24, 2006
One of the first games I was assigned when I first started in gaming PR was Crave Entertainment's Dreamcast launch title Tokyo Xtreme Racer. Besides having the dubious honor of being one of the first games to hit with the whole "xtreem" title, it also happened to be one of the only games I actually enjoyed pushing to the gaming press. Something abut Genki's knack for mixing simple car upgrades with a seemingly unending string of opponents in riced out rides, all against the backdrop of a freely roamable network of Tokyo's freeway system all made for one hell of an addiction.
Luckily, the series continued on well after the Dreamcast met it's early demise; the PS2 already has two fairly decent sequels in TXR: Zero and TXR3, both of which have expanded on the formula rather nicely. The PSP offering, on the other hand, is more of a return to the original game, except that it's stripped bare of the free driving aspect and instead replaces all those miles of Tokyo pavement with... loading screens.
In fact, this may be the game with the most cumulative load times of any PSP game yet released. You'll load for menus, for conversations with other drivers, and, yes, for the races. Later on in the game, if you're a perfectionist like me and simply must beat every car on the road, you'll actually run into races that are shorter than the loading screen it took to get to them. This is, frankly, unacceptable, and though I had a blast with the game, devoting an entire weekend to it, the kinks of the PSP hardware clearly haven't been ironed out by Genki.
So if we're talking about a scaled back, bare bones version of the game, the real question remains: is it any fun? If you're a fan of the series and can stomach the load times, the answer is an unequivocal yes. The same slow, intoxicating build of suping up your car and taking on hundreds of opponents is here, and it arrives completely intact, it's just that a lot of the atmosphere is stripped out of the game in the process.
Genki overcame the battery-siphoning problem of streaming the full game world by breaking it down into districts dominated by racing gangs. You'll pick from three of them, and then slowly take over Tokyo bit by bit. Before you can start painting rival gangs' turf with your rubber, though, you have to work your way up through the ranks, challenging your fellow gang members until you've beaten the leader and take control of things. This isn't terribly difficult to do with a stock car for the first two racers, but it does necessitate heading out into your territory to take on rivals for some of the latter races.
This is where taking to the streets comes in. Once you pick your direction (different racers for each district race in different directions), the game begins the lengthy loading process and then shows you a sort of live security camera feed of all the racers out on the road at the time. Each time you flip through, the screen will cut to static while it "searches" for (read: loads) that car. You can't challenge them until they've loaded up. Luckily, the game's HUD lets you view whether you've raced them or not, what level they're at, and what team they're on at a glance, so you don't have to wait for every car to load up, just most.
Luckily, the series continued on well after the Dreamcast met it's early demise; the PS2 already has two fairly decent sequels in TXR: Zero and TXR3, both of which have expanded on the formula rather nicely. The PSP offering, on the other hand, is more of a return to the original game, except that it's stripped bare of the free driving aspect and instead replaces all those miles of Tokyo pavement with... loading screens.
In fact, this may be the game with the most cumulative load times of any PSP game yet released. You'll load for menus, for conversations with other drivers, and, yes, for the races. Later on in the game, if you're a perfectionist like me and simply must beat every car on the road, you'll actually run into races that are shorter than the loading screen it took to get to them. This is, frankly, unacceptable, and though I had a blast with the game, devoting an entire weekend to it, the kinks of the PSP hardware clearly haven't been ironed out by Genki.
So if we're talking about a scaled back, bare bones version of the game, the real question remains: is it any fun? If you're a fan of the series and can stomach the load times, the answer is an unequivocal yes. The same slow, intoxicating build of suping up your car and taking on hundreds of opponents is here, and it arrives completely intact, it's just that a lot of the atmosphere is stripped out of the game in the process.
Genki overcame the battery-siphoning problem of streaming the full game world by breaking it down into districts dominated by racing gangs. You'll pick from three of them, and then slowly take over Tokyo bit by bit. Before you can start painting rival gangs' turf with your rubber, though, you have to work your way up through the ranks, challenging your fellow gang members until you've beaten the leader and take control of things. This isn't terribly difficult to do with a stock car for the first two racers, but it does necessitate heading out into your territory to take on rivals for some of the latter races.
This is where taking to the streets comes in. Once you pick your direction (different racers for each district race in different directions), the game begins the lengthy loading process and then shows you a sort of live security camera feed of all the racers out on the road at the time. Each time you flip through, the screen will cut to static while it "searches" for (read: loads) that car. You can't challenge them until they've loaded up. Luckily, the game's HUD lets you view whether you've raced them or not, what level they're at, and what team they're on at a glance, so you don't have to wait for every car to load up, just most.
