X Marks the Followup

This is a sequel post to the previous ‘Price of Power’ entry. I’ve spent a decent amount of time on Shutokou Battle X now and feel the need to comment on what I’ve discovered, and how it contrasts with what I expected.

To review briefly: after picking up an Xbox 360 I knew at some point I was going to have to buy and play Shutokou Battle X. It is my go-to racing series, and no matter what differences arise between installments I always have a pretty good time. Not too long ago I was dismayed somewhat by how much luster has worn off Shutokou Battle 2 for the Dreamcast, but it was still a good game.

The Price of Power ‘blog entry was my attempt to lament the drop in game content as graphic sophistication has increased. To make my point I chose two game series that crossed from previous console generations to the current one, the Earth Defense Force series and the Shutokou Battle games. The current chapter of EDF I’ve played through and was the impetus for writing the post. The section on Shutokou Battle was more anticipatory based on what news, information and rumors I could glean from the internet. So how did this latest Shutokou Battle actually stack up? Did the gutting of the content to fuel the graphics work to the detriment of the game? Did it move the meter away from substance and over to style?

The answer: Yes. But not as much as I thought it would.

Shutokou Battle X (Import Tuner Challenge in the USA) being the latest installment in Genki’s venerable franchise, had a huge foundation on which to build this game. The series has been on almost every platform since its inception, and Genki has had countless opportunities to tweak the mechanics, car physics, car selection, interface, complexity, graphics, and everything else. Like any developer making a sequel, especially as part of a franchise, Genki, has a fine line to walk between offering something new and different enough (from their own previous games AND other games) to warrant a purchase while not alienating long time fans who expect some mechanics and traditions to be maintained. Every Sonic game, every Gran Turismo installment, almost all of series, tread this narrow, perilous path. Occasionally enough time passes to where a developer feels that an intellectual property’s (IP) can be radically changed while still having a name that will be a sales draw. See the new 3d Bionic Commando or the upcoming Splatterhouse. Significant reboots of franchises are rather rare. Successful significant reboots are an order more rare still.

(Dedicated) gamers are picky fuckers. On the one hand they want innovation… they don’t just want the same old retread games. On the other, they break out the torches and pitchforks when developers go TOO far from what they perceive are the core mechanics (or narrative, or graphics, etc) that made the franchise beloved in the first place. Fans often deride developers and publishers for their lack of ability in seeing what made the good chapters in a franchise… well, good. But it really isn’t as easy as just ‘leaving the good shit in and adding some more good shit’. Who decides what is good shit? What aspect of the old game was THE good part? At what point is adding a new character a great idea, and when is it just lame? Like movie studios, game developers often seem to think MORE is the same as better… and who can blame them really when that so often seems to be what the audience responds to. The syndrome that Tim Burton’s Batman film series fell prey to? Hell, yes.

Genki didn’t reinvent the wheel (so to speak) with SBX. And I didn’t really expect them to. Shutokou Battle games are all pretty much the same game. Same mechanics, same plot (such as it is), same tracks (mostly), same opponents (mostly), same progression, etc etc. Fans of these games don’t play each installment religiously because they are always hungry for radical innovations. They play them because driving through traffic on Tokyo’s highways is really fun, but also each game’s backstory, rivals, and cars build on the previous chapters. Every new chapter does also feature just a bit of tweaking to the driving model to emphasize something different to go with the increase in detail and realism in the graphics that you’d expect. The likeness to actually being on the expressways gets closer and closer to the real thing. The updates have the latest car models to add to the game world.

I’ve likened the series (and all of Genki’s racing games) to role-playing games. The actual play features have a lot in common with RPGs; the hunting for opponents, the battles, the money earned, getting items (auto parts), affording better weapons (cars). But there’s also a history woven through the individual games, which affords the player as they spend the time necessary, a sense of very simple narrative progress complete with characters that grow, change, or drop out as time moves on across the series.

In Shutokou Battle X, the driving ‘feel’ has been made more forgiving. It is typical for Genki games to be characterized as having slippery or ‘floaty’ handling, but this really only applies to early or unmodified cars. In real life a low-power or stock car is not as difficult to keep on the road as this game indicates, but that is because the poor handling is an abstraction. It is designed to a) symbolize crappiness in both car and driver, ie ‘making you be crappy’, and b) give the modifications a serious effect. In real-world driving if you upgrade your suspension by small increments; maybe stiffer springs first, then stiffer dampeners, then bigger sway or anti-roll bars, then upgrade everything to a coilover system, then a racing-heavy four-corner adjustable coilover system. You will notice improvements but they may be subtle or only noticeable in the most extreme track situations. In a Genki racer they need every mod to make a demonstrable difference. So in effect, they start you off a little more difficult or ‘worse’ than real life, in order to encourage you to mod as soon as possible and then reward you when you do so with tangible results. The floaty handling usually manifests itself in the fact that you have to make lots of small adjustments constantly while driving, as if the car has a bit of a mind of its own. You have to constantly feed inputs to the controller to get it to go exactly where you want, a combination of steering being a bit loose or unstable and tires that don’t hold the road or give you a proper feel for when they are about to break traction. In the old Dreamcast chapter, Shutokou Battle 2, the game never completely dropped the tire feedback problem. In SBX the floaty feel seems minimal, only manifesting itself to me (and I may just be really used to these games by now) driving down straights when the instability of the steering has me making small adjustments to keep it heading correctly… rather like the tires needed balancing. Once you improve the tires and suspension, even by one increment, the floatiness goes away. This is a fairly big change from the old days where you had to buy the upgrades, adjust and test a lot, then fiddle with the sensitivity controls for the game itself. Continual upgrades, adjusting, and fiddling continue to improve the handling as always, but you can banish the trademark Genki floatiness almost right away.

Another difference in this game is how it handles breaking traction. Various installments have waffled back and forth as to how important or useful drifting is. In real life drifting is more useful in touge (mountain road) racing, or as a show and competition form on a formal track. It is not really used in highway racing which is more akin to driving on a circuit with its well-paved roads and less drastic elevation changes. Drifting would also be death used in highway traffic. Touge uses spotters to make sure the road is clear… doable on the short twisty sections out in the country. Can’t do that on urban expressways. So highway battling typically takes its corners in the slow-in/fast-out philosophy of grip racing. Being a driving fantasy, Shutokou Battle games try to incorporate drift… making it more important as drifting has gained popularity (as a competition) in real life. In earlier chapters, your car just broke loose and careened into a wall if you tried to drift. It was possible to get this under control, but it was almost in spite of the game, not because of it. With the PS2 iterations and the rise in drifting’s popularity, this changed, though still not allowed with the same alacrity as the companion series Kaido Battle. In SBX, losing traction (accidentally or on purpose) in a stock car will cause a weird, sudden slide that just as suddenly ends when enough speed is scrubbed off. It is jerky and unpredictable, much like the way the Ridge Racer games handle the same phenomenon. It was REALLY off-putting at first, because I have always hated Ridge Racers sliding. But much like the floatiness, this detriment can be quickly dialed down. And once you learn to expect it, it can be controlled right handily. I don’t think it is realistic… odd they didn’t just use the drift mechanics from the Kaido Battle series… but it does put the option to drift controllably as a firm, planned cornering option into the expressway battles.

Some other things: glancing off cars or barriers are rather like Shutokou Battle 3 on the PS2—some speed loss and a hit to your SP bar, but recoverable in all but the closest battles. A direct hit into traffic causes a really weird, almost slo-mo hit to the traffic car. The effect is roughly the same as all other Shutokou Battle games, but it FEELS like it is costing you a ton of time because of the perceived slowdown. I’m not sure if it actually does cost you more time… I don’t think so… and I’m not sure if this was intentional on Genki’s part; maybe done to make the player really hate crashing and really try to avoid it. Your car is also larger than its apparent shape, meaning you will hit traffic and opponents by just getting really close to them, rather than literally touching them. Driven properly this isn’t much of an issue, because:

This game is really REALLY easy.

Given the power of your modifications and the new more forgiving driving model, this game presents the least challenge of any Shutokou Battle game I’ve ever played. I finished the game handily in a JZA80 Supra that was still three upgrades away from the maximum allowable engine size. Supras are known for having overbuilt engines that can handle monstrous amounts of horsepower, but I didn’t have to get anywhere near those titan levels to romp through all the final bosses of the game.

And you know what? That lack of difficulty was okay, frankly. I have enough games on my plate that require scadloads of practice or effort to progress in microscopic increments (Mushihimesama Futari anyone?). This was really enjoyable to drive and race just for the pleasure of it.

The new versions of the cities are really beautiful. Lots of detail, and animation. A couple of new offramps added that lead to an entirely different kind of racing for this series, with very hard-angled corners. New rivals, new bosses, and everyone seems to have gotten a graphic overhaul for their stickers, the rivals’ team or nickname emblems.

Okay, so the game was fun… more fun than expected considering the rumored losses. Losses that turned out to be true, but had little effect on my fun with the game. What were the losses exchanged for the improvements?

Drastic downsizing of the car list. There are only about two dozen car models in the game. That is a major drop from the hundred or more that was typical in earlier chapters. There are a few more makes and models amongst your opponents than you can get yourself, but besides limiting your options, this really increases the repetition amongst your opponents. Many teams have members that all drive the same car. Many bosses have had their traditional car changed. It was quite disconcerting to see some historic rivals like the Death Driver and The Emperor have such radically different rides. The number of cosmetic upgrades (aero parts, vinyls, etc) help this somewhat. But at the end of the day, this was probably the single biggest hit to my pleasure in the game. It was a groaner to think to myself ‘oh another team entirely made up of Evos’ over and over again. One of the big attractions to Genki Racing Project games is the immersion factor, and that has always been helped considerably by the number of different car types (multiplied by the possibilities in modifications) you could encounter. It has seemed like no two cars were alike, like real life. And there have always been plenty of oddball or weird cars thrown in like vans, utility trucks, muscle cars, or maybe a Corvette Z06… all unexpected in the racing environment of Japan. None of that in SBX.

Downsizing of the highway map. They dropped the Wangan and Yokohane expressways, the epicenter of flat-out drag racing in these games. These areas had to be opened up in the previous games by progressing… and offered a stark contrast to the tighter corner-based racing of the games’ initial C1 tracks. This could’ve been as big a drag as the loss of cars except Genki added the two aforementioned offramps which themselves have some fairly long drag-able straights. Genki also took a cue from the Kaido Battle series and started putting parking areas into the game. Parking areas are the social heart of Japan’s racing scene. At key offramps around the expressway system, the racers, teams, hangers-on, groupies, and just plain car nuts gather around and talk, compare vehicles or just loiter. Music is blaring, challenges are made or refused, a lot of snacks and drinks are bought out of the area vending machines. This adds a lot to SBX, giving new forms of interaction, and new places you have to go to find your rivals.

Traffic is a lot more sparse. This is probably in keeping with making the game a bit easier and more accessible, though I’d say Genki’s inexperience with optimizing the graphics comes into play and they needed to minimize slowdown… of which there still is some in instances where many cars are onscreen, the developer’s traditional weakness in this area.

That’s really it for the minuses. Less cars, less track, less traffic. The first two are definitely ‘content’. The game isn’t literally shorter than other iterations in terms of rivals and number of races to run, but it is really obvious that there is less variety. As I said, this bothered me less than I thought it would because, and I don’t want to sound like a graphics whore, the game is just so much prettier and realistic. And my mind was taken off the shortcomings by having the two side road areas and new rivals to master.

As if time has continued its march in the Genki world, so some old teams have disappeared, new teams have arisen and the player has to find his place in the scheme of things… usually at the top when all is said and done. There were some pretty cool things to this part of it. There is a selection of bosses that have been recurrent through the games usually called the Thirteen Devils. For this game, they are kind of in semi-retirement and a new group, the Phantom Nine, have come to prominence. Upon beating the Phantom Nine you, of course, catch the attention of the remnants of the Thirteen Devils. This is all handled with cool intro videos and music.

It is as fun as ever to knock these rivals on their asses and once again assume the mantle of King.

Note: I played the japanese version of this game. One wanderer rival, Green Wild Child, has a different requirement than what is indicated in the USA version (Import Tuner Challenge). His Japanese requirements are the same as they are in SB3 on the Playstation 2, a license plate edit.

Mixed Feelings.

I’m in the middle of a nostalgic, but epic run through my beloved old games and systems. One of these old games is Shutokou Battle 2, known in the US as Tokyo Xtreme Racer 2.

I’ve got earlier entries that go on at nausea-inducing length about how much I love Genki racers like the Shutokou Battle games. This one, the second Dreamcast-based episode was the reason I got into them. See those earlier entries for the details if it matters.

In any case, I originally played the Japanese version. I was really smitten with the description and some demo I’d played of the first one, but I wanted the expanded world of the second one and didn’t want to wait for a localization that might never come. So importing it was the way to go. I didn’t understand all the text, mostly the wanderer descriptions, but all the upgrades and gameplay stuff was in English, so I got through it and thought it was practically masturbation material.

Recently, in my fit of oldskool fondness, I got ahold of a USA version of the game. I’ve played subsequent episodes in English, and knowing the details of the rivals and all that only added to the experience. It had been years since I’d even looked at this old game, and while I was digging my re-look at the Dreamcast, I figured I might as well replay this old love in an even more understandable, engaging form.

It ain’t quite the same. The graphics have aged pretty well. The cars and streets look fine. The music is still decent, with one tune being a real standout, and some of the best ‘racing battle’ music ever in a game. BUT, some of the actual gameplay specifics are just ass. The controls are part of the issue. The Dreamcast has analog triggers for gas and brakes (most racing games can be mapped to these controls) exactly as I prefer, but there is some disconnect between how hard you pull the trigger to apply the brakes and how hard they are actually applied. If you want a little bit of braking, you have to go REALLY light on the trigger. Pull the trigger halfway and you get full panic-stop brakes and your tires break loose from traction. This basically has the effect of making your brakes worthless IF you try to brake with the timing and feel of all the other Shutokou Battle games and most other racing games besides. It is really irritating. It must not have bothered me much back in the day because I was either enjoying the novelty of the other aspects so much OR I just didn’t know any better not having played many of the others. This is something I’ve gotten used to somewhat, but in the panic of a really close race I find myself reverting to my tried-and-true methods and timing and I typically blow the race. My win-loss record is truly pathetic compared to other Genki racers.

The other bigger problem is the balance between racing and upgrading. Most racing games have a ‘career mode’ of some kind. The one-player story sequence game where you start with a shit car and work your way up by winning races, upgrading your car, buying faster cars, and winning some more until you finally finish the game by having one all the races the game has in its roster. Most allow you to keep playing in an effort to unlock (or buy) any cars or parts you still don’t have.

Genki racers have a very specific methodology to their career modes, oft imitated, but in my opinion, never equaled. You still have to win, upgrade, then win some more. Racing games’ career modes have to strike a balance between challenging you with races that test you, but reward you with cars or parts around the time that you actually need them. When you first start, your car is crap but the races aren’t hard. You buy a few mods and then the races are easier at first, but then they start to get challenging. When you start to lose a few times or really have difficulty pulling off wins, the game unlocks more cars or parts… and this is the cycle. It is possible to suck so bad at racing that you lose and don’t unlock more parts, but most of the games will allow you to grind away at replaying races you’ve won until you earn enough money to buy parts that will allow you to overcome your suckiness. This ‘grinding’ is familiar to RPG players. They have to battle a lot of peon monsters to earn enough gold to get the super-item needed to get past an NPC or boss character. This repetition can often break the fun out of a game. Over the years Genki racers (and other racing franchises) have fine-tuned their play progression so that the player gets fed the ability to get additional parts at the ‘right time’, assuming your skill level is reasonable. If you can find reasonable racing lines, and stay off the walls and your opponents, you will win enough cash to afford better cars and parts as you need them. Memorizing new tracks so you race the correct lines, and learning how to stay off faster, more aggressive opponents in turns is the challenge part. If you get hung up in a game with a fair progression/difficulty curve it is because you need to learn the track better.

With Shutokou Battle 2 this is not so much the case. I have frequently found myself up against opponents that you simply cannot win against. Your car is not fast enough to keep up, no matter how you’ve tweaked the settings, and no matter how well you stay off the walls and avoid traffic. When you look about for better parts… either there aren’t any OR you don’t have nearly enough money. And the game is VERY stingy with the money. In the case of ‘I have money but there are no parts’ the game is basically telling you to buy a new car, but you’d have to have A LOT of money to both buy a car that is significantly better than the one you have already and to be able to upgrade it. You need to upgrade right away because you probably already have your current car maxed and no vehicle fresh off the showroom floor will be its match or better… certainly not one you can afford. So it becomes a money issue again.

So here’s the problem. Opponents you can’t beat, so you don’t progress. No parts to buy because you’ve bought the best of everything. Upgrading to another car is expensive, and the parts cost more on the better cars. So you’re left with ‘grinding for gold’ basically, by re-racing old opponents to slowly, tediously build up your cash and get a better car. This process is aggravated by the games insistence on making opponents worth less every time you race against them. So the game forces you to race for peanuts, over and over again. This process is why I don’t care for the Gran Turismo series. The nuts and bolts are a bit different in that franchise, but apart from the absolute lack of atmosphere and color, you have to race and re-race the same tracks for piddly amounts of cash. It just isn’t worth it to me, though I know a lot of players swear by those games. In iterations of Shutokou Battle after number two, you don’t really run into a lot of this problem. Between improved controls and a better progression curve, when you get hung up in the game it is typically because you need to learn the street section better (or confront them in a section in which you are stronger), get better about staying off the walls (because with the better rival, every tenth of a second of speed scrubbed off on a wall is a potential race loser), or tweak your cars settings. If you finally reach a point where a new car is needed you typically find that you are really close to affording it, if you didn’t buy unnecessary cars at some earlier point.

So this is kind of a drag. I guess this didn’t bother me much years ago, because I hadn’t been spoiled by the more balanced progression Genki would come to dial into their games. I’ve also got the much more recent Kaido Battle Touge No Densetsu (Tokyo Xtreme Racer Drift 2 in the States) going on as well, and it is the very model of the balanced progression I’ve been talking about. There is some grinding, but it is as much to learn the tracks I suck at, as it is to earn money. AND they give you quick and easy ways to earn cash other ways. Repetitive to a degree, but not like the seeking out and racing of penny-ante drivers in Shutokou 2.

I still see what was great about this game. It IS obviously a step in the evolutionary process of Genki developing their racing system. Sometimes you go back to some old game you remember fondly, and it is just lame. Often the graphics play a big part of this. Most people, particularly old school gamers, don’t want to cotton to being graphics whores, but it is awfully hard to sit through hours of NES graphics (or heaven help you, Atari 2600 or Mattel Intellivision screens) when you’ve been spoiled by modern games. The eye candy of 16-bit consoles (Genesis, TurboGrafx-16, and SNES) can still hold up okay. This being a Dreamcast game, and not an early one, it really doesn’t look far off from the PS2 or Wii. The game’s system is the hang up. Like an old movie you find doesn’t scare you the way it did when you were a kid….no matter how well filmed.

At this stage the game is a chore. When I finally upgrade the new car (which I’ve bought, I’m just grinding for parts money), maybe the game will break wide open and be fun again. But the gloss is off now. Not tarnished exactly, but not the same as it was. Never thought I’d say that about any game in this series.

I’ll just blame Genki actually. It’s their fault for improving the damn things so much.

(screenshot swiped from IGN)

I AM The Legend, Baby!

Wow. I just started to really get into playing Tokyo Xtreme Racer Drift 2 (Kaido Battle: Touge no Densetsu)... and this is just a kickass game.

I know I need to get over my frustration with Blazing Lazers and just finish the damn thing, but it'll be hard while I've got this one going on. Drift 2 is not a new game in terms of release date, and I actually bought the Japanese version quite some time ago, but by the time I was ready to play it, news of the English one was out, so I waited. I got into Racing Battle: C1 Grand Prix and then got stuck trying to find all the 'wanderer' character cars in THAT game when I bought the English Drift 2.

So blah blah blah, long time 'til I started this game that I should've started (and finished) a long time ago. This game just reminds me of why I love GOOD video games (or books or movies)-- immersion. And I pretty much go through this every time I start a new Genki racing game. These games are not well-loved by the critics. They are very kvlt, especially in English-speaking countries, most players totally dismissing them as not enough of a simulation, or not up to Gran Turismo or Forza graphic levels. Or having 'skatey' controls. Missing the point of the games one and all.

Genki games have COLOR. Gran Turismo is pretty, and realistic (for a medium that can't actually grant you the physical feedback of being in a real car), but has shite for driver AI and is the driest, most plot-bare game world you can imagine. The other end of the spectrum is the Pro Race Driver series and they are perhaps TOO story-oriented, tracking you pretty linearly through an adventure game-style plot, but with cars instead of guns or items, and races instead of fights. Games from the Genki Racing Project have a world. Opponents with names, identities, and driving styles. They communicate with you. You have to go find them sometimes... or wait when they get off work, or when they agree with the weather. The controls are slippery in some sense, but nothing I've found that is particularly difficult to get used to, and it actually enhances what upgrading your car will do for you. If you want your car to control just like it would in some other racing game, some effort and the right parts and settings will get it there. And it usually doesn't take very long. Genki racers aren't about grueling your way through 500 of the same goshdamn race for peanuts at a time. There is some repetition, but you get different styles of course, variable weather, different victory conditions AND a staggering number of individual opponents. The game has a constant flow of goals for you to reach. Not just 'man I gotta win this race 61 more times and I can get that Skyline R34'. You are always in a state of wanting to see what comes next, whether it is a new track to be unlocked, a new gang of drivers to defeat, or just wanting to get on the ingame BBS to read the trash talk or cries of defeat from your rivals. Reading what defeated drivers say to you when you walk up to them at a later date in Drift 2 is worth the price of admission, re: 'You spanked me so bad last time, I don't even want to talk to you, yo.' or 'It's the drift god! I'm not worthy!'.

The best entertainment experiences are about immersion. This whole world in each Genki game comes at the cost of the most detailed cars or most realistic physics. It is a compromise or a balance. I don't know if I'd characterise these as arcade racers so much as sort of 'idealised'. While the controls may seem odd at first, you can adjust so much (including your controller's sensitivity typically), that once you get used to it, the number of cars, parts, tracks, track conditions and all of that put it squarely back into 'simulating' what it would be like to be a highway or mountain pass street racer. If someone is a fan of Initial D or another racing manga getting these games is like dropping yourself into the comics. Especially the Kaido Battle games, since those are based in the mountain passes like Takumi's adventures. And of course Genki includes all sorts of nods to Initial D.

I've recently joined up with a message board for fans of Genki racing games. I guess there are just enough of us to create an online goober space. I'm inspired to find those last few wanderers in Racing Battle, and maybe someone at that forum can help me.