Initial D Gaiden (Game Boy)

I'm sure most of you are familiar with Initial D, but for the few that aren't, it's a comic/TV/movie/videogame franchise that started in the 90s, and it's all about people with badly-drawn faces taking part in street races down twisty mountain paths, mainly at night. If you were reading English-translated manga around the turn of the century, you might remember it being advertised in the back of seemingly everything Tokyopop published for about two years. Anyway, Initial D Gaiden is a Game Boy incarnation of it. Oddly, I think it might also be the first ever videogame adaptation of the series, beating the Saturn game Initial D: Koudou Saisoku Densetsu by three months.

It's a pretty simple game, but I consider that to be one of its strengths. You just pick a car, then participate in a series of one-on-one races until you get to the end of the game. Obviously, drifting around corners is a big part of the proceedings, and luckily the devs made that fun and easy to do: you just have to let go of the accelerator, tap the brake, then go back to holding the accelerator down. Just like Outrun 2, which came out about 5 years later! There's no car tuning or parts replacement or any other complications, you just go from one race to the next, with a little skippable dialogue scene between each one.

Mention has to be made of the game's presentation too, which is generally excellent. It must have taken a miracle, but the developers somehow managed to give a racing game that plays out on a tiny four-colour screen atmosphere! Even though the road seems to be  floating in a black void, it and the cars still look great, and the backgrounds really do give the feeling of driving down a mountain road at night, with the city lights shining in the distance. The only real problem the game has presentation wise is the lack of music, having instead a constant low buzz representing engine sounds punctuated with high pitched beeps when you're drifting.

There's not much more to be said here: Initial D Gaiden is just a really good racing game, on a system that isn't really known for them. It's a shame that the license precluded it from getting a worldwide release so more people might know about it. But without the license, would anyone have taken any notice of it today, including me?