There’s also a fairly comprehensive multi-layered decal editor. Anyway, once you’ve chosen your first car you can buy the usual upgrades for all sides of your vehicle, add spoilers and wheels or decide instead to tune it to make it drive better and faster. I’d guess its because the game has to load an entire area but then I’ve played Test Drive Unlimited on the PSP and this is not an issue. After the intro it’ll take somewhere between 5-10 minutes just to start your first cruise!! Sadly this gripe immediately puts a sour taste in your mouth and occurs throughout the game. It takes around 10 seconds to load each section of the game – the intro movie, then the race, then the win, then the trip to buy your first car, then the trip back out to Tokyo’s highways. The first thing you’ll really notice and I mean really notice are the loading times. Win this very simple race and you’ll get enough money to buy your first car. In this introduction the player is racing against Hanzo. The game starts on the hugely straight neon lit Aqua-line bridge, which connects the cities of Kawasaki and Kisarazu, although neither are fully featured in the game. So they’re certainly not new to this genre but this is their first venture onto the PSP. Conversely they’ve also done some dire games as well including another Namco effort – Street Racing Syndicate, which again was set in Japan, but was sadly rather pants. Another plus are its programmers Eutechnyx, who have worked with Codemasters on Micro Machines, and produced the fantastic Total Drivin’ for the PS1, Le Mans 24 hours, and Big Mutha Truckers for various formats.
Of all these games, Tokyo Drift is most like Shutokou Battle and that’s good because none of the other games feature Japan and so there’s clearly a gap in the market for a Japanese Street racing title.
The best of the current bunch is Rockstar’s US based Midnight Run 3 although on the PSP it does suffer a little from frame rate issues but that aside it is set in 3 different and rather large cities. Genki’s Shutokou Battle or Wagan Midnight Portable on the PSP are another attempts and, in Japan at least, is the largest series of any dedicated Street Racing game although rather sadly, much of the series hasn’t made it to Europe. Then we have the rather bland effort Juiced, which isn’t based on any IP as such. There’s various examples of the genre and the mostly widely known in Europe and the US are the games in EA’s Need for Speed series. Many The Fast and The Furious game users have revealed how entertaining its storyline is.Loosely based on the movie The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, this is another attempt to capture the ‘Street Racing’ market of which about 60% of all current console racing games are based around.