| | | Man this is a smooth driving game. I haven't got very far through it, both because it is mammoth (I think I read once that there are about 200 track variants, all told) and because the sensation of cruising through midnight San Francisco, electronic tunes blasting on the car radio, pulling awesome drift turns on all the corners, racing against my ghost car for lap after lap, is just too addictive, and I just do that all night instead of trying to advance in the game.
But some day I should.
Graphically and sonically, the game is still a stunner. Seriously. Just great. The control is very nice on my little wheel, too. It's just, like, wow. Bizarre Creations knows how to make a pleasing drive.
Much has been made of the "kudos" system, which rewards you for laying down rubber during races while avoiding crashes, basically, and how easy it is to milk the system. I don't really care about that too much, although I do like getting extra points for drift-style cornering. |
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| | | | Oh, did I mention that they're city tracks? Yeah. Like San Fran, London, Tokyo, and some other places. I love city racing. Screw those long boring country circuits; gimme towering buildings, hairpin turns, narrow streets and bridges any day. |
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| | | The tracks are fairly blocky and the colors can be a bit browny bleached out in bright daytimes--the game follows strict time-of-day based on your system clock and time zone, so you may go from a bright afternoon race in SF to a night race in London because it's afternoon in your Pacific time zone. ; )
Handling is still pretty good--basic, but good. Somehow the heavy gear-shifting (if Manual is selected) and handbrake handling system works and hey you get those Kudos if you drift a bit on a corner.
Problem is that you I think only earn actual Kudos in the races / time trials in the very lengthy campaign mode, and you need a certain number of Kudos to open the next chunk of races, and you need to unlock tracks in campaign to have them available in Time Attack mode, AND when you re-race a campaign track, you don't just ADD new Kudos--you have to re-earn them, so you could actually net LOSE Kudos if you don't perform as well on the track as you did previously.
SOOO yeah uh shoot. You'd be grinding the same tracks desperately trying to e-brake drift enough corners (and you get a prominent PENALTY when you hit most barriers) to get your Kudo rating on the track high enough to add up to an unlock for the next tracks--and I'm already having to do that on the FIRST THREE TRACKS in my uh preview of the game.
Dagnabbit. Because time attack at night times with the built-in NON-licensed radio station music is pretty groovy. But I sure do hate the thought of having to drift-dance to try to qualify for unlocking more than three tiny tracks, sheez. |
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| | | | I suppose that's where you would work out how to download a complete save from someone who'd already unlocked everything. = P |
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| | | | ^ That's counting from "60 fps" YouTube videos, both those claiming to run direct from DC and those that are running via emulation. |
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| | | | The Flycast emulator, which I just happened to find yesterday as having way more options and non-blurry ones at that compared with redream, has a 60 fps "cheat" for the game: https://youtu.be/iE5-QU24B9Y?t=19 |
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