The Shutokou Racing (Game Boy Color)

 I think I've mentioned this before, but I really like the simple top down racing games that have SEGA's Monaco GP as their patient zero. Zippy Race, Rally Bike, Mad Gear, that kind of thing. It was very much a genre of the eighties, though, and 1998 seems like a very late time to be releasing one, even on the Game Boy Color. This is only conjecture, but I feel like The Shutokou Racing was probably a passion project by someone who was themselves a fan of the genre, and wondered to themselves how it might be modified, and made into a longer, more "console-like" experience.

 

I'm sure that last sentence has struck dread into the hearts of some readers, and I have to say your suspicions are correct: this game is a grinding festival. Basically, there are four races, and the place in which you finish one race is your starting position in the next race. You've got a number of lives that deplete every time you crash (the starting number determined by your equipment), and running out of lives is the only way to get a game over. Instead, finishing a race, no matter where you place in the ranking, gets you some prize money. If you aren't in first place by the end of race four, the season restarts, but your money and equipment carry over. So you're expected to just keep failing until you're eventually rich enough to get the upgrades needed to go fast enough and win the season. 

 

Then you can play the second season, which is harder, faster, and more exciting, though it still relies on the cyclical grinding structure. There's also a "Classic Mode", which is a much simpler game, harkening back to the original Monaco GP, with enemy cars just mindlessly bouncing left and right off the sides of the track. Unfortunately, it's a lot slower than the original, even on hard difficulty. Another thing to note is that the game's main mode even has the "ambulance of death" that occasionally zooms up from the bottom of the screen, wrecking all in its path, which is also very specifically a Monaco GP reference.

 

Though I hate grinding in action games as much as any other sane person, in this case, I don't think it's a gamekiller, at least. The fact that the game's on a handheld makes it a nice little thing to occupy the mind while semi-watching some mediocre TV or something. I'd have preferred something closer to the arcade games mentioned up at the start of this post, but The Shutokou Racing isn't a total write off.