made by most of the same people as juiced before they broke off to form juice games and you can really tell, especially visually. feels like it has to be the same lighting tech and environment building methods (in a more primitive form). honestly it looks kinda cute in-game sometimes but the menus are about as dissonant and unrefined as the first juiced but it doesn't matter when you barely use them.

but at least in juiced even if it felt kinda like driving a barge at times there was never really a point where i felt like i was fighting the game. in gtc africa, there's never a point where you aren't. steering response time is abysmal (at least half a second) and when it finally gets going you usually enter into a weightless slide and have to fight to exit the corner.

this isn't so bad in the first half of the game where you have really easy opponents and wide tracks with generous runoffs, but the back half starts slimming down all the tracks and then decides to start putting debri on corner entries/exits and even the apexes sometimes for some arcane reason

and if you hit them, you're probably done for (at least for the race). i spent most of my time in the end of the game trying to work out how the ai worked cause there wasn't much else to do in 20 consecutive 8-10 minute races, and i still have no clue. only thing i CAN tell you is if you fall into last place it's a nightmare to get back in the points, and the ai difficulty seems entirely based on what track you're driving and maybe even how fast you get off the line? but there's definitely some sort of rubberbanding in place; you can force them into walls and they'll find their way back in a lap or so.

at least the career structure allows you to lose a fair amount, it's all championship format (10 fairly short races each for the first 2, 20 endurance races for the last) so you can build a lead and not have to care so much for the next 2 hours worth of racing. unfortunately all you get for beating the last championship is a jpeg and no unlocks.

i don't think i'd recommend this to anyone honestly but if you do play it i at least want you to know that there's no value in the back half and you're torturing yourself for nothing. the only reason i stuck with it for so long is i was in awe at the car list honestly, you get the normal rally staples of the time (focus, cosworth, the lancer/impreza), and then they just stick a bunch of early 2000s american fodder in there to pad it out. it took an embarrassing amount of time for the novelty of driving pontiac vibes and ford cougars to wear off for me.

Dont play the game. They lasted a year after this before making the most underrated extreme sports game ever (Rolling) and then imploding

Definitely an improvement from the first game in everything except for the fact that this game do be too got damn long for its own good. The main new addition to this is the free roaming map that ya drive around in to get to the various events scattered within, both visible on a big in-game map as well as secret stuff that can only be found through exploration. While it def makes everything slower than just pushing a button on a menu to get to the races, I actually did find the free-roaming quite fun as not only is the city reasonably sized and vibin' with its neon-coated glowing buildings and setpieces, but also it functions as a decent way to practice driving in a safe environment without having to constantly redo races n such. Considering the fact that a lot of the races take place in the giant city, having the familiarity of both the controls and the map through the free roaming do make it so that it's easier for me to get in the flow of things.

The game just kinda drags on a bit too much imo, has that same problem that a handful of racers I've played have where the mid-game is a bit more stagnant and difficult than the rest due to not having a properly upgraded/maintained car that the game might be expecting me to have. I feel like if they reduced the games length to like 2/3rds of its total runtime that this would be a lot more digestible. The open world explorable city already gives the game plenty of reason to go back to it and keep playing, they didn't need to have such high event complete quotas n whatnot. That being said though, it's really not like there's any gripping narrative going on here, it's just car gangs doing car gang things with very sparse cutscenes (that feel way lower budget than the CGI cutscenes the first game had but whatever). If I had this game back in the day I prob wouldn't have even cared about the story progression and just spent all my time just driving around the city taking in the wonderful 2000s ass visual and audio aesthetics that this game is rich with. I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of people that bought this game played it exactly that way.

(if i have to do ONE MORE drag race event i will go insane and drive into the highway, those events are ASS and I hope this is the last game in the series that they are featured in)

You know, I joke a lot to myself about the "guy that buys the yakuza games solely for the arcade games", but here I am, I am the guy now. And how could I not be? For the first time in the 25(!!!) years since this game first hit arcades, we finally have a playable version of this game on a home console, with no need for obtuse command-prompt emulator frontends getting in our way.

This game basically takes everything that the first Daytona did and continues to do it just as well. 3 courses to drive through with the first basically being a training stage for learning how to drift properly and the other 2 being more interesting race tracks. Drifting in this game is the same as the first; you can do so through either gear shifting or braking and regardless of which option there is quite a high skill ceiling. The visuals are incredible, really leaning into the theme-park attraction style vibes and thrills that come from these kinds of arcade racers, with setpieces that include cities, ice glaciers, haunted houses, canyons, an alien space ship, wide open fields, and a giant rocking pirate ship serving as eye candy to zoom through.

With attractive visuals to lure me in with the deep mechanics to keep me playing, this is yet another example of a banger arcade racing game. The version featured in the latest Yakuza game is a rebranded version of the "power edition" of this game, which adds some new content like a marathon endurance course combining all 3 tracks together and brings the original daytona car as an option. They also changed the beginner courses scenery from a lush biodome to a generic nascar track and scrubbed out the daytona branding due to licensing, which is lame but it is what it is. A hornet by any other name drives just as fast.


if sega adds scud race to a yakuza game i will personally fly to sega HQ and kiss the entire ryu ga gotuku studio staff

Ridge Racer Type 4 represented racing towards the future. The platonic form of driving represented by crossing the finish line and becoming the champion of real racing roots '99 at the exact turn of the millennium. In contrast, Ridge Racer V is racing in the future, as imagined in the Y2K era of the early Playstation 2.

Ridge Racer V is, compared to the soft, silky, jazzy vibes of Type 4, a much more aggressive game in terms of visuals, music and gameplay. This lead me to not like it as much as its predecessor first, but after playing more and learning the feel of the new tracks and cars, I came to appreciate the art of drifting through ridge city. Drifting is absolutely the name of the game here, it's much easier to enter a powerslide compared to previous games in the series, and even the grip cars will be powersliding around most corners. This results in early moments of frustration as you will regularly lose control of your car, but once you learn to tame these beasts, the game becomes very satisfying, the first time you win a GP against the brutally aggressive AI will be a moment to remember.

The music is still full of bangers like Type 4, but there's less direction in the soundtrack. You can tell that in Type 4 each song is designed to perfectly complement the race tracks - the bass solo in Naked Glow is just as much a part of Wonderhill as the environments and corners themselves, but while songs like Euphoria and Samurai Rocket are still great, they don't have the same kind of bond with the race tracks themselves, and frankly I found a few of the songs in this game to be forgettable.

Ridge Racer V takes a less narratively-driven approach. This time you manage your own team (which is mostly done behind the scenes), and participation in the ridge city race events is very much an individual affair. This leads to a more "console racer" and open ended feeling to the game, for better and for worse, but it does mean that this game has way more content and longevity than previous Ridge Racer games. I especially love how time attack is incentivised and contextualised within the game. Most tracks have a rival time that you can attempt to beat, if you beat all of a given rival's times, they will be available to 1v1 duel, and if you beat them in that duel, you unlock their special car that represents the extremes of Ridge Racer V's car design and variety. It's awesome stuff and I really wish more racing games did this kind of thing.

If you can take the time to learn this game it's an extremely rewarding experience, and one I appreciate in helping me get back into the racing game genre. You can tell that Namco were well and truly at the top of their game in this era, and Ridge Racer V definitely deserves its reputation as a standout early PS2 title. It doesn't quite reach the heights of Type 4, but it's close enough in almost all respects.

Also, Ai Fukami > Reiko Nagase. :^)

...really?

This is supposed to be the "worst" zelda game? The game so infamously awful that it spawned the reactionary absurdist art for that is the YTP??? The game so irredeemably terrible that Nintendo themselves would rather bleach it entirely out of the canon, out of the official release timeline, and out of the public conciousness??? Perhaps I have high kusoge pain tolerance, but I actually found this game quite impressive.

The game is entirely side-scrolling, with areas segmented into these little 2-4 screen mini levels that usually have an item or a boss fight at the end. The game uses scanned images of hand-drawn pictures to form the level backgrounds, and it works surprisingly well. The collision detection functions rather solidly. The controls take a little bit of time to get used to, as theres the typical zelda item-based gameplay at play when the CD-i controller only has 2 functional buttons, so the pause/inventory screen is done by pushing the item button while crouching. It does mean you unfortunately can't pause the game or switch/use items in front of any door, as the second button becomes a context-sensitive door use button. Juggling between the lamp and other items to keep dark rooms visible is also a bit of a pain. Outside of that, the control feels rather solid. While I initially thought it would play more like zelda 2 given the side-scrolling perspective, this game actually feels like a bit of a mix between castlevania and ghosts n goblins. It has the slow, methodical pace and movement as castlevania yet the more lateral level design and "throw shit at the wall" enemy placement that loves to be just too high or too low to hit def reminded me of ghosts n goblins. The only part in the game that's actual horseshit is the final level, ganon's lair. There are too many got damn snakes that do too much got damn damage and sometimes the high enemy count lags the CD-i to a crawl.

The game def has some design problems but its nowhere near as absolutely garbage as I was led to believe all this time on the internet. If anything, the fact that they made a game like this work so decently on what is essentially a beefed-up photo CD player is really lowkey impressive. The OST also bumps way harder than it has any right to, even with tracks that dynamically change depending on whether you are indoors or outdoors. I honestly had more fun playing this than I did with some actual Nintendo-ass zelda games. Would definitely suggest giving the game an earnest play-through instead of just brushing it off as "the funny bad meme zelda game". You might be surprised.

God Damn.

The first Tokimemo game was an honest stroke of genius. While it certainly wasn't the first gal game, Konami used their experience in game development to make a social simulator that gamifies the high school experience in a way that combines the snappy, quick, replayable nature of arcade games with the narrative and stat growth systems of then-contemporary console and PC games. With the sequel, Konami set their sights to the goddamn moon. and they actually delivered.

The core gameplay remains unchanged between this game and its predecessor. There's still the fun balancing act of having to juggle academic stats, personal health stats, and relationship stats within your 2 actions per week. The iconic bomb system is here, albeit nerfed a tad (I don't think I had more than one bomb at once to worry about on my playthrough here, whereas tokimemo 1 might as well have been mfin bombergirl). They didn't bother reinventing the game mechanics, instead focusing on bolstering those mechanics with a world as dense and alive as the Playstation 1 could possibly provide.

The cast of characters in this game is much more vibrant and quirky here than in game 1, for better or for worse. It can make the game feel a bit more tropey than the more reserved and down to earth vibes that the first game provided, but it also has a bit more spice in it because of that. There's even a prologue section to establish childhood friend relationships/give the player a personality test that influences stat growth in the proper game, rather than just throwing you into high school with no proper context of your classmates. Despite each character usually having a central trope or gimmick, none of the characters are one-note and have a myriad of different events and situations to enjoy. Each of them live different lifestyles, and as such require completely different approaches. Even the dude side character has gone from the comedic relief sleazeball homie that hooks you up but isn't a threat in the first game to two rival characters that look for love of their own, even potentially competing with you. Hell, they even managed to make a GOOD Ijuuin character!!! Characters are what make or break a game like this, and this game has an extremely strong cast.

The world and overall interaction with it is done with such a bespoke attention to detail, it's crazy. Characters have a myriad of outfits they wear depending on the weather and their affection with you. You can choose which honorifics to use with each character, where calling characters differently at different stages in their relationship yields different results. There's a seasonal brochure you get every few in-game months that lists various timed events and happenings in the area, whether you care about them or not. You can even sacrifice an entire memory cards worth of data to create voice synthesis data for a girl of your choosing to pronounce your name in dialogue. To put the amount of content this game has in terms of detail into comparison here, this game uses a whopping five discs to contain all the different events, interactions, and variations of everything, yet completing a run still only takes 8-10 hours. The world density also makes the game incredibly personal; no two runs will ever be the same. I highly suggest finding someone else to play through the game alongside you to compare and contrast how each of your playthroughs and school lives are going.

Overall, yeah. They took the already incredibly solid base the first game had, and polished it to a wonderful, glistening sheen. The technical culmination of the genre. The gal game to end all gal games. The Gran Turismo 4 of dating sims. With how modern hardware is and game budgets/manpower ballooning to the point they are today, I doubt there could be another game to challenge this games relative scope for its time. It really does feel like konami gave the tokimemo team a blank check to make the best thing they possibly could, and they succeeded. I can't say something like that could ever happen again. Did I also mention that the OST and its many arrangements are absolute bangers?

I have a pretty big backlog to the point where a lot of games I play are one-and-dones, but I can safely say for certain this won't be the last time I play through this game. I've only got Miyuki's ending, there's still so much more to do! An absolute must-play.

Man, nothing more me-core than "I should play some gizmondo while waiting for fedex to deliver my CD-i" today. I gotta play all like 12 of the games on that thing before it melts, yanno? Honestly this game has no right being this solid when it's stuck as an exclusive for a console more known for being linked to a mafia than being an actual system for playing games.

It's a physics based puzzle game where you knock balls around billiards-style in order to stick em together. If all of a color is stuck together, it clears out and you get points. Clearing all of the balls on a board takes ya to the next level, it's very arcadey. The depth comes from the fact that you have a limited number of shots, though connecting one loose ball to another of its color gets you your shot back. It's all about observing the board and knowing what the best course of action is for getting clear shots in the right order, and honestly given the solid physics there's a lot of player agency on board. Probably a decent skill ceiling, though I can't imagine many other people have played it enough to really wring out any potential depth here, considering the whole "gizmondo exclusive" thing this game has going on. It makes sense that this game is also so solid too, considering the fact it was made by the Pickford Brothers, of Plok and Wetrix fame. Apparently it was going to be a PSP game but somehow got relegated to the ol mafia. As it happens. I guess it got an iOS port though, so hey! that's something. If you are one of the statistically improbable that has a gizmondo, this is probably in the killer app territory. Which really isn't saying much. The game has a really funny name, too!

DAW SKEET SKEET SKEET SKEET SKEET SKEET

The vibes in this game go hard, I want to live in this 2003-ass city of perpetual nighttime. Everything is well lit and rendered, there's a copious amount of 6th-gen motion blur everywhere when you go fast, but things still manage to be (for the most part) readable. The OST is a bit hit-and-miss though, I like the dumpy menu music beats but the race music being more 2000s edgy emo type vibes was kinda unfitting to me. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big sucker for that stuff, and it also serves to solidify this game as an excellent time piece, but it seems more fitting for daytime racing than underground nighttime racing. I associate night vibes with like techno-y D'n'B-y adrenaline vibes and not hard guitars and edge I guess, but that's probably more of a me thing. Despite all that, the vibes this game has are my jam, love this kinda shit. I haven't seen any of the fast and furious movies, but I have heard that this games aesthetic is borrowed heavily from em so I might have to give em a watch.

On the game front though, this game is a bit hrmmm. 112 events to do is kinda exhausting, and the AI has that classic need for speed rubberbanding. It reminded me of playing NFS2, where you could run a perfect race and fuck up on the last turn and everything would be for naught. The weighty momentum-y feel of the cars plus the aggressive rubberbanding and decent amounts of traffic means the lategame is really frustrating, as fuckups are easy and will ruin your race many, MANY times. Nerfing your car and setting the difficulty to easy can mitigate a bit of the AI problems, but at the end of the day the events still end up feeling like a bit of RNG, where you just gotta keep retryin over and over again until the game feels generous enough to let you win. There are other non-racey events like drift point challenges which are fun and these weird drag race minigames that are less fun and are more just memorization of where traffic spawns to avoid.

It's a decent tonal shift of the NFS series while keeping the same style of gameplay, and I've heard Underground 2 is where the wheels really start turning so it's probably better to play that instead if you want your early 2000s night city racing fix.

Gran Turismo 4. This is it. I don't think I can overstate how big this game is, both in terms of its content and its legacy within the racing game genre. This game basically takes everything from the previous GT games and cranks it up to inhuman levels. The GT series to this point has always been in the upper echelon of console racing games, but with this game, they basically created a golden standard for the genre. Like, when the developers for the first Forza game were talking about competing with the PS2, they weren't talking about the GT series as a whole. They, like many others, were trying to dethrone this game specifically. That's how big this game is. It's an absolutely monumental racing game that can absolutely last you a lifetime with how much content it has. With all that being said though, it still ain't my favorite racing game, or hell, even GT game.

Firstly, the good. They basically took GT3 and gave it a simulation mode that puts it more in-line with the insane sim mode in GT2. There's the same "do events, earn new cars that give you access to new events" loop that made GT2 so engaging, and there's things like used car dealerships to get rid of the credit-grind slog that was GT3's campaign. There are over 700 cars to collect across all sorts of events. Circuit tracks, city tracks, one-make manufacturer events, specific car type events, rally events, endurance events, you name it and it's here with an insane amount of polish. The driving in this game is the best that the series has been up to this point, with it having that nice realistic feel to it. I am no real life race car driver so I can't actually comment on how ACTUALLY real it is, but it certainly has a good feel to it. The UI and soundtrack are as fantastic as always (though I still found the licensed race music kinda eh but I think that's just how things are gonna be), and visually this is one of the best looking games on the PS2 with an insane amount of visual polish, and even support for progressive scan and a mode that uses some interlaced shenanigans to get a high-res mode of 576x960!!! Considering the power of the PS2 the fact that they can get something like that working at all is incredible, much less running as good as it does with the visuals that it has. In terms of technical mastery, gameplay polish, and stylish UI, this is the GT PS2 magnum opus.

But unfortunately, there are still quite a bit of qualms that I have had with this game in my entire playthrough. While I do have a decent enough PS2 wheel that I can use with this game, I really don't prefer to play with a racing wheel over a pad and I don't have a good place to even set up the wheel anyways so I was kinda screwed on the control front. The game uses the pressure-sensitive buttons on the PS2 controller and it's not able to ever be turned off, and I find the dualshock 2's pressure sensitivity to be a bit too mushy to be used as precisely as needed for a type of racing game like this. I played the first half of the game using a very cobbled-together wheel setup that shook when literally any FFB happened, before eventually giving up to use a controller with the steering bound to the left stick and accelerator bound to the right. Neither control scheme was really elegant for me. If this game supported the neGcon (which it very well could have), then this would all be a non-issue and it would absolutely elevate this game to an 11/10 status, but some things are just not meant to be. The high-resolution mode is also more of a gimmick than anything, as my upscaler didn't really like how it tried to display the image, my cables are too crummy to get the best out of it, and the menus and UI all run at 480i anyways so I honestly stuck to the default resolution the whole game as well. Lastly, my final issue with the game comes from its pacing. While the core racing structure of GT2 is back in this game, it doesn't feel nearly as well-paced when it comes to what agency the game gives through prize cars. A lot of events end up giving you a prize car that can't really be used anywhere else, leading to a lot of "dead end" moments, where I just kinda had to sell the car for credits to get the cars that I did need, or just ignored them altogether. Since earning certain things is locked to overall completion percentage, I found the best thing to do was just to do the rally events as they offered the highest payouts alongside cars that I could actually use in a multitude of events. Playing that way just meant I spent most of my time doing a bunch of really slippery rally events, when I'm honestly more of a fan of the street/circuit racing... And then the GT world championship at the very end is both such a huge difficulty spike and time sink, being 3-4 hours long for a single attempt with insane competition that I really got kinda sour by the end of the playthrough. Getting the REALLY good cars to breeze through the GT world championships involves winning the endurance races, and those can take up to 24 hours of real time to complete, and considering the fact I barely had time to attempt the 3-4 hour GT world championship, I REALLY didn't have time to get the best cars to smoke the competition. You could say that problem is def a skill issue from relying too much on better cars and parts over driver skill to win (and it certainly is, I suck at GT), but I think it's lame that the game lets you get away with that strat for everything BUT the one event I really didn't wanna get stuck in.

So yea. sorry for the long review, this is a game with a lot of things in it and as such I had a lot to say. It's honestly a masterpiece of the racing genre with so much care, attention to detail, and CONTENT put into it. I didn't even mention things like the B-spec mode where you can train an AI to race events for you, or the photo mode that allows you to render extremely high res (for the time) photos of your cars to a USB drive. It's one of those games that I'd absolutely consider for a "desert island" pick, for sure. But I still think that GT2s campaign pacing and flow was more engaging than this. Regardless, if you are even SLIGHTLY a fan of cars, racing games, the PS2, or just driving in general, you HAVE to give this game a go.