Metropolis Street Racer

"Pretty Graphics!! Groovy Music!! Yeah!"

** INTRO **
The theme of this game by Bizarre is that you are racing awesome looking cars (that you will likely never drive) throughout the streets of San Francisco, Tokyo and London. You go through a series of ''quests'' and earn Kudos (points) depending on how well you do on each race. The cool thing about this game is that the game uses the Dreamcast internal clock to determine the time of day. For example, I'm playing in Toronto at 3 pm; when I do a race in Tokyo, it'll be the middle of the night in the game.

** GRAPHICS **
The game is beautiful. Lots of detail has been put into the cars and also the actual courses as well. Things like street signs, skid marks, touristy monuments are all included. Did you know that they actually mapped out the scenery in each city? I've never been to any of the cities, but supposedly, the game depicts each city quite well. I heard somewhere that the designers took tons of photos of each location. While racing, you can choose between a number of camera views; each adding to the feel of actually racing. As mentioned before, the change in time of day definitely adds to the gaming experience.

** SOUND **
This is one of the COOLEST parts of the game. Normally you don't really notice the music in games but this one you do. Depending on which city you're in, the car radio will pick up local stations and play that as your music. It even comes with radio ads and DJs. As for the actual songs, the majority of them are true racing/cruising songs (the kinda that you want blasting from your car). A variety of genre are represented: R&B, hip-hop, Japanese pop, techno/house, jazz, country, and rock. To tell the truth, the country, rock and wannabe hip-hop songs don't really fit. Maybe it's my taste in music but I swear some of those songs are horrid (check out the hip-hop song that tries to sound too much like Will Smith .. blah!). There's even a jukebox option to customize what songs you want played while you race.

Oh, the sound effects are good too! Each car that you use has a distinct engine sound (they thought of everything!). Skidding, collisions, horns are all there.

** CONTROLS **
Not much that I can say. It works. The cars respond well to your analog stick input. Same goes for accelerator and brakes. At least it not like Gran Turismo for Dreamcast where you move like crap.

** GAMEPLAY **
I don't think that you can get bored with this game, seeing as there are tons of races to master. There's about 10 races per chapter, and I think that there are about 25 chapters. That's 250 races!! Oh! And it's not just straight racing ... there are time trials, fastest laps, passing certain number of cars, etc. This game is definitely challenging. In order to advance in this game, you have to earn a number of Kudos points before you unlock the next level. Your points are determined by your ''skill'', ''style'' and ''penalty''. In each race, you can crank up the difficulty, thereby increasing your skill. For example, the default to finish 3 laps of a course is 2 minutes. You can choose to impose a time limit of 1 minute 30 seconds on yourself to increase your skill. Style is completely out of my comprehension. It has to do mostly with you doing a sliding turn and getting the Kudos symbol to appear as you go around the corner. This is quite annoying because this forces you to do slide turns with the emergency brake around every corner (this also slows you down). Penalties are also freakishly annoying. Everytime you bump a railing car or another car, you get penalized. You could have done an amazing job on a race and get like 100 Kudos, but if you did a lot of crashing or bumping, you'll lose a crap load of points (it can put you in the negatives).

By earning Kudos, you earn unlock new races and new cars. I don't know exactly how many cars there are, but by the end of the first chapter, you'll have at least 6 or 7 cars to use. I believe that there are about 30 cars (I'm guessing). Each car handles differently than the next (as it should be). The cars are rated in terms of its racing ability. One thing that I wished that you could do is to modify the car like in Sega Rally. You know, screw around with the gear ratios and such. The most annoying part of this game is that you will be doing races over and over just so that you can earn that one extra point to unlock the next level. This fact reduces the enjoyability of the game.

** OVERALL **
Visually very nice. Music is great! Controls are ok. Idea of Kudos points is novel and interesting. Lots of cars to use. Too hard at times (ie. have to do races perfectly!!) Definitely worth the money!!

** RATING **
Graphics - 9/10
Sound - 10/10
Control - 8/10
Gameplay - 7/10 (would be higher if it wasn't so hard)

OVERALL - 9/10 (not average)

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 01/06/01, Updated 01/06/01