Games

   Review by: MidnightJ (Jul 13, 2007 18:30)

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Which takes place in much of the Gunma Prefecture of Japan. Many locations in the Gunma Prefecture contain roads and courses such as Haruna, Akagi, Shin-Myogi, Nikko or Iroha-Zaka. These are just a few of the many that there are.

Orignally this game is called Kaido Battle, with 2 sequels, Kaido Battle 2: Chain Reaction, and Kaido Battle: Togue no Denetsu, which was released in North America under the name "Tokyo Xtreme Racer Drift 2".

The story of the game is basically these 2 Kaido kings who are the top Kaido racers in all of Japan, and you come in as the new kid and try and work your way to top for the fame they hold. Eventually you end up racing them. Thats pretty well all there is to the story, and a lot of it won't make sense unless you know what the Gunma Prefecture is and all the legends and stuff.

The game has a excellent opening cinema, and great looking menus and icons, but it does not live up to its gameplay. When Genki translated from Highway to Mountain, you still feel some of the highway formula stuck on the mountains. Meaning the cars literraly handle like a a tri-cycle with skis. Now of course, playing it enough, you will get past all the handling problems and somewhat enjoy it, but overall if you've ever played Initial D or Genki's highway racer Wangan Midnight, you would think Genki would make it a much more enjoyable game. The E-brake on your car really doesn't work like a emergency brake does either, all it does is make you skid like you have your foot half way on the brake and close to flooring the gas. E-brake is almost pointless unless it is a hairpin like turn.

Probably one of the most unecessary things in the game is the whole e-mail thing, you recieve so many pointless messages that make 90% no sense and really just a waste of time to even read them.

Another problem is the very long loading times, going from your garage to the menu or vice versa takes 15-20 seconds! Very unecessary problem, with most games it either takes a 5 second loading screen or no loading at all.

Graphically, the game is really quite horrible. The tracks look fantastic with excellent road textures and your headlights light the road up very nicly at night, but the cars look like garbage and the trees and anything to the world details are horrible. To me they look like - 2X anti-aliasing, with very jagged textures and very pixelated.

Sound wise, all of the cars sound like vaccume cleaners, no matter what muffler you put on your vehicle it effect the sound of them no different. You really can't tell the difference between a turbo engine and a natural aspiration engine. Also a rotary engine is very unaccurate.

So the word DRIFT must mean something right? Well in fact, it really doesn't. Drifting is extremly hard to a new comer since counter-steering is something you must do, and since there is no such thing as anti-lock brakes in this game, you'll pretty well spin out on every turn. I have been around the racing style of drifting since 2001, and know exactly what needs to be done to initiate, and in this game the way it is suppose to be done never works.

After playing this game and playing other games of the genre and from Genki, I know they could of done a much better job with this game, and they should seriously stick to there strengths in highway racing games. Considering the game has been out since 2003, and later released in the US/Canada 3 years later, it seems crazy that it was even brought here. And after playing even the 3rd game in the series, its barly improved over the first one.

In the end if your desperate for a mountain pass style racing game, this could be worth the money, since it only goes for 10-20 dollars. The core value is the career mode (Conquest mode in the game) is very lengthy, but thats about it.