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Enthusia Professional Racing
  PS2DrivingUC  
  opened by paleface at 03:19:24 09/19/05  
  last modified by paleface at 12:27:18 03/05/24  
  paleface [sys=PS2; cat=Driving; reg=NA]
           
Somewhat gimmicky "realistic" racing game from Konami, featuring a decent selection of licensed cars and a small mix of real-world and imaginary tracks.
 
While racing, a shaded box vibrating around the edges of your screen is supposed to show G forces, or something, and at high speeds you start to get a streaky, blurring effect at the sides of the screen. Neither of those does much for me--I'm trying to watch the road, sillies! You can turn them off, however; same with the weird center-of-gravity display near the middle of the screen...I think.
 
The cars look good, and the game sports some nifty shiny road and windshield rain effects. From time to time, though, parts of the backgrounds, which are otherwise generally unremarkable, will pop out as being a bit low-poly, such as a big building in the far background that's obviously just a large sprite. But there isn't much slowdown to be seen.
 
The game has a concept of "Enthu points" that you lose if collide with things. I'm not sure what all they do, but they have something to do with allowing you to proceed through the main race mode. And you unlock new cars and so forth. No tooling with parts, though.
 
As I said, the driving is of the "realistic" variety, which as far as I can tell meanst that you'll find yourself spinning out a lot. I tend to prefer driving games that give me a little benefit of the doubt when it comes to handling, so this isn't quite my cup of tea, but I suppose some people must like it that way.
 
There's a funky secondary game mode that's like DDR in a car: you drive down a wide straight pier, having to hit little target checkpoints at just the right speed to keep building up a combo. I suppose you could spend a lot of time with that, but it seemed like kind of a waste to me considering that you've got this full-blown car simulation all set up and waiting to be put through its paces.
 
Speaking of DDR, the music in the game seems to fall mainly into the electronic funk/pop category, and at a fairly mediocre level.
    

 
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