Pretty Chaser (PC)

 There aren't many arcade-style racing games I've definitely mentioned before that there aren't many arcade-style racing games any more. The big companies tend to go towards the two extremes that arcade racers fall between: realistic "simulation" style racing games where no fun is allowed, and totally wacky kart-style racing games where randomly assigned power-ups can sometimes play too large a part in results. There are a few arcade racers coming out here and there, though, mainly from indie/doujin developers. Like this one, from solo developer YY Games.

 

It's a very bare bones affair: there are three tracks, one type of care (though you can choose between grip and drift handling), and no gear changing of any kind. You can change the number of laps and opponent cars, and the skil level of the opponent cars, though. And the colour of your own car! So you set all the options, then you race around the track. That's literally it, though: there's no high score table for best lap times, no championship mode, nothing. But that's fine!

 

If you like racing games, give Pretty Chaser a try! It's cute, it's free, and you'll probably get at least twety to thirty minutes of enjoyment out of it. The developer has another racing game that not only looks to be a little more complex, but also significantly cuter. So I'll probably try that out and cover it here eventually, too. I know this is a shorter post than usual, but a lot of Playstation games, fan translations, and leaked unreleased games have been drawing my attention recently, and I do try to space similarly-themed posts out a little, and that's what this one is doing.

Hang On GP (Saturn)

 There's a couple of things I need to say to start this review off. The first is that you'll probably notice from the screenshots that the emulation for it is far from perfect, and there's a fair bit of graphical glitching. However, it does seem to run at full speed, and plays totally fine, as far as I can tell. The other thing is that it's also known as Hang On GP 95 and Hang On GP 96. Yes, they are all the same game.

 

When I remembered recently that there was a 3D Hang On game for the Saturn that I'd never played, I was excited. I'm a big fan of Hang On, Super Hang On, and even the minor oddity Hang On Jr., a port of the original to lower-powered hardware, presumably for arcade operators on a tight budget, and Was interested to see a version with some nice mid-90s low poly graphics. I was pretty disappointed, then, when I loaded up Hang On GP and rather than the old formula of racing against the clock to reach checkpoints on long, linear road tracks, you are instead in a more standard racing scenario, racing laps around looped tracks against other riders.

 

It's not a bad game, though. It's fast and it plays fine (though considering that it's a Saturn original rather than an arcade port, you'd think they would have made it control a little better with a D-pad), and it looks great, especially considering how early a release it is. There's a lot of pop-up, especially on the city stage, but that's forgivable. The aesthetics are really nice: it takes the stereotypse of "SEGA blue skies" and really runs with it. The stages take place on a tropical island (complete with a row of moai heads!), the Great Wall of China, and a generic modern city, and they all look great, and like places you'd really want to go to.

 

Hang On GP isn't a great game, and I'd even go as far as to say it was a disappointment. But it's not a bad game, either. I do vaguely remember it being universally panned in magazines at the time, but that's definitely understandable: the early days of the Saturn had a lot of similar racing games, a lot of which were first party like this one, and almost all of them were not only better than Hang On GP, but they also had the allure of being arcade ports in their favour.

Ace Driver Victory Lap (Arcade)

 Everyone knows about Namco's arcade racing series Ridge Racer, right? But long before that, there were the Pole Position games, and from them eventually came the Final Lap games, and from them came the first Ace Driver, and this, its sequel. I was going to review both Ace Driver games, but since the first one only has one track, a graphically enhanced version of which is included in this game, I decided not to bother with it.

 

Ace Driver Victory Lap was released in 1995, the same year as Rave Racer, so although Ace Driver seems to have been mostly forgotten by history, it was running alongside its more popular sibling at one time. I guess the difference is that interest in Formula 1-style racing games had waned by the mid-nineties in favour of the street and mountain racing seen in Ridge Racer? Maybe that's also why Ridge Racer got home ports, but Ace Driver never did?

 

Anyway, you know how racing games go: you race around tracks, both against other racers and against a time limit that gets extended every time you go trough a checkpoint. There aren't any special gimmicks on display here, it's just a great-looking, competent racing game that's fun to play. I guess the slightly futuristic setting could be considered a gimmick, but it doesn't affect gameplay at all. There's no boosts or power ups or anything like that. Just a great use of colours (with an emphasis on purple, brown, and silver/grey that works surprisingly well) and a kind of eco-technological world with giant skyscrapers and machinery alongside perfectly clear skies and seemingly untarnished nature.

 

Unfortunately, I don't hve a lot more to say about Ace Driver Victory Lap. It's good, you should play it if you see a cabinet somewhere, or if you have a good enough computer to run it in MAME (and if I do, you almost definitely will, too, to be honest).

GripShift (PSP)

 This is a review that doesn't feel good to write. The thing is, GripShift is a game with many admirable aspects: it's unique, it's full of innovative and interesting ideas, it feels good to control and move your character around, and so on. Unfortunately, a few negative aspects are so overpowering that they undo all of the above, and the game ends up being less than the sum of its parts as a result.

 

The game's concept is a pretty simple one, that I can't believe I haven't seen being done before or since (well, I guess Sonic R is pretty close, but not quite): it's a combination of 3D platformer and racing game. More specifically, your character is always in their car, and it always controls like a racing game, but while there are a few races, most of the stages in single player mode are 3D platform stages, complete with collectathon items and so on.

 

The stages are of the "islands floating in space" style, and you fail the stage if you fall off it. This is frustrating, but forgivable. Obviously, it's the kind of game, like say, Speed Power Gunbike (a game I love), that gets better the more you improve your skill at playing. The problem is that completing a stage isn't necesarily completing a stage. To explain, the aim in most stages is to figure out how to get to the exit, and then actually get to it before time runs out. If you manage to do this and also beat certain goal times, you'll also get a medal, and some credits. (You get credits for collecting all the stars in a stage, too.)

 

The bronze goal time is shorter than the stage's time limit, and the silver and gold goals shorter still. They really should have just had the bronze time as the time limit, though, as you get no credits unless you get at least a bronze medal, and you need a certain amount of credits to unlock more stages. The credit thresholds aren't low, either: after I'd played through the beginner stages, I had sixteen out of twenty-five credits needed to unlock the easy stages. At the end of the easy stages, I had fifty-two out of eighty-five needed to play the intermediate stages! Now, most of my non-review game-playing time is spent on arcade and arcade-style games, so I have no problem with score/time chasing, but to make it a mandatory part of progression like this is to turn it into an annoying chore. 

 

So that's it, then. GripShift is a game I wish I liked, and I wish I could recommend, just on principle. It's just a shame that all those good ideas are sunk by that one albatross of bad progression. Since this was published by Ubisoft, I'm going to be generous to the devs and assume it was the result of some suit-wearing moron deciding that they couldn't possibly release a short game and trust the players to enjoy it, they had to crowbar in hours of compulsory repetition.

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.

Cross The Ridge R (PC)

 Despite the word "Ridge" in the title, this game has a lot more in common with the Initial D series than Ridge Racer. It really does have a lot in common with Initial D, too: it's an arcade-style drift racing game where you take part in one-on-one races that all take place on incredibly bendy Japanese country roads. Also there's lots of eurobeat music.

 

There's some stuff in the game I don't quite get, too. Like how there's a huge selection of cars to pick from, but you only get to pick once, the first time you load up the game. Also, if you're using an XInput controller (or a Dual Shock 4 masquerading as one), the controls are mapped automatically, but accelerate and brake are mapped to two of the face buttons, rather than the analogue triggers. But seeing that the menus are almost totally horizontally arranged, it looks like the developers were assuming that most people playing this game would be doing so with a steering wheel.

 

The main mode is arcade mode, which has various courses, each one consisting of four races, each against a different opponent. Complete one course to unlock the next, though I don't know how many there are in total yet, I've only played the game for a couple of hours at this point. It's been a fun few hours, though! Of course, right from the start, your success relies upon your ability to drift well, so it's important that it feels good to drift. The devs have done a decent enough job of this, I'm glad to report. I think I've been spoiled by the likes of OutRun 2 and Ridge Racer 3D with their incredibly easy works-every-time drifting, but Cross the Ridge R complicates things just enough to make a good successful drift feel incredibly satisfying. You've got to know just exactly when and for how long you need to switch back and forth between accelerating and braking when taking each corner.

 

I have mixed feeling on the graphics, though I do admit that they're not totally rational. There's something in the combination of low poly 3D models with blurry low resolution textures and the high resolution of the game itself that really reminds me of the days of X Box Live Indie Games. It looks fine I guess, if a little sterile. The big problem I have with it though, is that when I think of drift racing games, my mind always instantly goes to the ones on Playstation and Saturn, with their super-grainy textures and short draw distances (especially on the night time stages) that really added to their atmosphere. I know this kind of nostalgic thinking isn't really fair, though, so I won't consider it too thick a black mark against Cross the Ridge R's  name.

 

In summary, Cross the Ridge R is a game I can easily recommend. There don't seem to be many racing games of this kind released in the past decade, it'll probably run at full speed on almost any modern PC, and it only costs a few hundred yen! If you like arcade racers, it seems like it'd be rude not to pick this one up.

Shinseiki GPX Cyber Formula VS (PSP)

 You might not have heard of Shinseiki GPX Cyber Formula, but it's a series that's interested me for a while. Originally an anime that aired on Japanese TV in 1991, obviously trying to cash in on the popularity of Formula 1 racing in Japan at that time. It's not a massive franchise, but it does seem to have been a bit of a cult hit, spawning several straight-to-video sequels over the course of the 1990s, and a seemingly endless stretch of videogame adapatations, with the most recent being released in 2018. Despite all this, and even despite the existence of an English dub that aired in parts of Southeast Asia, almost nothing of it has ever reached North America or the UK, with the one exception being the SNES game, released in the US as "Cyber Spin".

 

This entry was released in Japan only in 2008, and it's pretty good! When it comes to racing games, I'm usually more interested in the glamourous likes of the Ridge Racer series than the grey world of Gran Turismo or F1, but having seen a few episodes of the source material, I decided to give it a chance. It mostly plays like an arcade-style racer, rather than a psuedo-realistic simulation, which is definitely fine by me. There's plenty of different things to hold your attention, too.

 

There's three main modes of play, ofr a start: Survival, which has a very arcade-like structure, and sees you competing in races until you fail to finish one in first place. Unfortunately, I've only managed to get a few races deep into this, so I can't tell you if it's endless or if it has an ending. The fact that the tracks are always presented in the same order suggests to me that there's an end to it, though. Conquest is the one of the three I've played the least, and seems to be made up of shorter, harder, one-on-one races. The real meat of the game seems to be in the GPX mode, in which you pick a set of stages, and race through them in sequence, with the usual system of points awarded for higher finishing places, and so on.

 

What's interesting about GPX mode, is that the higher difficulty courses add more laps to each race. This is interesting because the cars in the game have a boost function, limited by the amount of fuel it uses up. It's essential to winning races, and as the races get longer, it'll run out a lot sooner before the ends of the races. So, as you progress through th ranks, you'll have to get better at both rationing the use of your boost, and in timing your visits to the pit lane to refuel. This probably doesn't sound like much to people who are more used to simulation-style racers, but in most racing games, I pretty much never enter the pit, so it's interesting to see a game that necessitates doing so, without slowing down or over-complicating the action.

 

There's a couple of other side modes in there, too: a solo drag race time trial mode (called ZERO 4000), and a mode called "Max Speed Attack", which sees you racing round part of a track, attempting to reach as high a speed as possible when you go past two specific points. I've made a few attempts at beating both these modes, all unsuccessful.

 

Anyway, I'm not even sure if most of my readership is even interested in racing games (which is why I try and keep a bigger gap between each one than I do with other genres), but if you are, this is one that's definitely worth a look. It looks great, it's fun to play, and it's fast. All you want from a racing game really, right?

Drive Girls (PS Vita)

 Drive Girls is a game that had been on my Vita wishlist for a long time, and when you look at it on paper, it's not hard to see why: a beat em up developed by Tamsoft, with a weird gimmick? Of course I'm going to be interested! (The weird gimmick being that the playable characters are girls who can transform into cars.) Unfortunately, I recently got ahold of it, and it's a big disappointment.

 

The main problem can be boiled down to the fact that although the Simple series was dead by the time Drive Girls came out, it still displays in abundance the worst excesses of that budget range, despite being sold as a full price title. There's a lot of recycling: the enemies are various kinds of generic giant slightly robotic-looking bugs, with only a few models being repeated in different sizes and colours. Even more egregious is the fact that while the first two stages take place in different locations, stages two to six all take place in the same location!

 

But anyway, the transformation gimmick. For the first few stages, it's a lot of fun! You beat up the enemies, and when a new batch appears in the distance, you transform and drive towards, then into them, as a cool little opening gambit. You'll soon learn that the safest and most effective way of dealing with enemies is to transform and drift around in circles, doing big damages to any bugs that get in your way. Even this gets taken away from the player, though. After about five or six stages, rows and rows of landmines start appearing. The landmines do a ton of damage to you, but they're only set off if you go over them in car mode. So, in lieu of giving the enemies themselves an effective defence against your drifting, the game essentially punishes you for trying to use what is not only its main gimmick, but the most fun and effective way of playing. 

 

As well as the regular beat em up stages, there's some stages where you race another cargirl around a track. These are surprisingly straight-laced and down-to-earth. The only real deviation from a normal racing game in these stages is that you have a boost that's charged by driving through the small groups of enemies dotted around the tracks. It's okay, but nothing special, and very very easy once you've figured out that running over bugs charges your boost.

 

This game was a big disappointment. Tamsoft are one of my favourite D-list developers, but I guess Drive Girls really proves that they are still D-list nonetheless. Go and play one of the Oneechanbara games instead, and don't waste any time on this one.

Simple V Series Vol. 2 The Tousou Highway Full Boost - Nagoya-Tokyo Gekisou 4-Jikan (PS Vita)

 That incredibly long title means it's once again time to look at that most beloved of budget game franchises, the Simple Series! It's a bit of a sad entry this one, too, since as far as I can tell, Simple V Series Vol. 2 The Tousou Highway Full Boost - Nagoya-Tokyo Gekisou 4-Jikan is actually the last ever Simple Series game. It's also  a part of the same subseries as a game I've covered in the past, the post-apocalyptic longhaul road trip Simple 2000 Series Vol. 112: The Tousou Highway 2 ~Road Warrior 2050~. Which means that it's also a Tamsoft game! We all love Tamsoft, right?

 

Anyway, like Road Warrior 2050, it' another longhaul road trip, though this time it's set in present-day Japan, and as far as I can tell you're getting briefcases to deliver them to the yakuza so that they'll release your secretary, who they've lock in a dungeon. While Road Warrior 2050's journey was punctuated by occasionaly sections where you fought waves of enemies on foot, Full Boost breaks up the long drive in a variety of other ways.

 

The game's main gimmick is that it's not intended for you to complete the whole journey in one car. Most of the vehicle types get damaged very quickly, and all of them have alarmingly small fuel tanks. Obviously, a car with no fuel can't go anywhere, and also if you're in a car when it explodes, that's an instant game over. Furthermore, a car's maximum speed gradually reduces as its fuel meter and structural integrity decrease. So, you get out of the car, and try to steal another one. This is a part of the game that's a little sloppy, though, as the only reliable way of getting a car to stop long enough for you to get into it is to let it run you over. Inexplicably, this doesn't hurt you at all.

 

Of course, the police aren't going to just let you go on your highway carjacking rampage, and they'll regularly come along to try and spoil your fun. If a police officer catches you on foot, or pulls you out of a stationary vehicle, they'll try and handcuff you, and getting free reduces your stamina a little. Running also reduces your stamina. Despite all this, it seems like the developers wanted to create a non-violent game, as you have no way of keeping the police away, even temporarily. So if there happens to be a few officers around while you're trying to switch to a new vehicle, it can be a little awkward and very difficult to get away with it.

 

The last thing I want to talk about is the power up system. There are power-ups strewn about the roads here and there, and collecting them progresses a Gradius-style power up chooser along the bottom of the screen, with four different things to choose from. You might be tempted by the quick thrill of selecting Boost every time you pick up an item, but honestly, it's worth saving up four of them each time to get the last option, Guard. What this option does is gives your current vehicle an impenetrable rainbow forcefield, increases your top speed to how it would be if your car was undamaged and full of fuel, and it stops your fuel meter from depleting while it's in effect. Practical and fun!

 

The Tousou Highway Full Boost isn't some grand swansong for the illustrious Simple Series to bow out on, but it is emblematic of the series at its best: it's a fun, unpretentious game with a lot of low budget b-movie charm. I do recommend giving it a shot, though it's a download-only Japan-only PS Vita game, so its legal accessibility isn't great, and it's only going to get worse as Sony continue their policy of gradually pretending the system never existed. Still, if you can get ahold of it, you should. It's fun.

Battle Outrun (Master System)

 Contrary to what you might think, unoriginality can actually be a powerful tool in creating a great game, using the core concept of an existing game and adding your own twists and ideas to make something new and exciting. Kid Chameleon did it to Super Mario Brothers 3, and Mortal Kombat did it to Street Fighter II, for just two examples. Battle Outrun is unfortunately an unsuccessful attempt to do it to Chase HQ.

 

In case any of you aren't familiar with Chase HW, it was an arcade game released by Taito in 1988 (a year before Battle Outrun), and subsequentally ported to pretty much every active home system at the time. In it, you play as a cop engaged in ar chases with criminals, who you have to catch by ramming their car with yours until they stop. Battle Outrun has you playing as a bounty hunter engaged in ar chases with criminals, who you have to catch by ramming their car with yours until they stop,

 

The only idea that Battle Outrun really adds to the Chase HQ concept is an item shop that appears once a stage, offering upgrades for your car, which are absolutely necessary if you want to make it past even the first stage. Tire and engine are pretty obvious, while upgrading your body reduces the amount of speed you lose when you collide with cars and other objects, and the totally useless chassis upgrades affect how far you fly when you drive over the ramps that appear a couple of times per stage.

 

The other thing Battle Outrun adds is frustration. Like in pretty much any racing game that takes place on city streets, there are many civilian cars acting as obstacles in your path. More than any other such game, the civilian cars in this gme feel like they were programmed with a sense of deliberate malice. They'll often deliberately drive right in front of you, or between you and the criminal you're trying to ram, or they'll get in front of you and stay in front of you, so you hit them repeatedly and lose five-to-ten precious seconds. Even when you've upgraded your body and engine a couple of times, this is still incredibly annoying, and feels totally unfair, too.

 

Despite what I said in the opening paragraph of this review, though, the biggest problem Battle Outrun has is its similarity to Chase HQ. Taito's game even got a port to the Master System in 1990, with better graphics, more speed, and obviously, a more streamlined and fun design. So play that instead, and just don't bother with Battle Outrun.

I Love Bikes! Street Racer Soul - Rider's Spirits (SNES)

 Also known as Bike Daisuki! Hashiriya Tamashii - Rider's Spirits, this game might look like one of many Mario Kart wannabes with super deformed characters and mode 7 tracks, and it pretty much is that. That is, except for one little detail: it's much more boring than most other games in this subgenre. 

 

You pick one of eight motorcyclists, including an army man, some  fairly generic girls, a character with cat ears on their helmet, a leather-clad gay stereotype, and some even more generic male motorcross guys and another one I can't remember, you race around the tracks in a grand prix arrangement with points being awarded depending on your finishing position. Of course, the CPU riders will always finish in the same order, so if you don't perform perfectly in every race, you aren't going to win the championship. 

 

There's three sets of tracks: amateur, novice, and pro. Oddly, amateur comes before novice. Unfortunately, there's no way to see the novice or pro tracks without getting first place in amateur, not even in time trial mode! After several hours of trying, the best I've been able to manage is second. So if there's a lack of variety in the screenshots, that's why. 

 

Anyway, other than the slightly wacky SD characters, this game's a lot more subdued than its genremates, and it's not a decision that works in its favour. The worst thing is the items. Firstly, there's no items to collect on the tracks, instead you can get one item per lap by going through the pit stop (though thankfully, you don't actually have to stop there). Then, when you actually use the item, it just shoots straght upwards, to descend, usually unseen and without any satusfaction, on one of the other racers. Other than that, it's a game that generally just feels slow, fiddly, and awkward at all times.

 

Obviously, I don't recommend I Love Bikes! etc, etc. Don't play it, it's rubbish. It has a translation patch, and I do kind of feel bad for the people who went out of their way to make that, but at the same time, i'm not insulting their work. It's the game itself that's bad, their translation is fine.