Metropolis Street Racer

"Do you feel like fighting the draconic difficulty, punk?"

When people argue what SEGA did to kill the Dreamcast, 2 games usually come up during the discussion: Space Channel 5 and Metropolis Street Racer. Both of these games received an out of this world budget, were touted as being the best-of-the-best but they came out to lukewarm sales.

While this was too bad for Space Channel 5, it's pretty explainable for Metropolis Street Racer which, while revolutionary and featuring a plethora of cars and cities, can easily become one of the most aggravating and boring experiences on the Dreamcast.

Graphics: 9/10

MSR excels in the graphics department. It really should come as to no surprise, knowing what budget this game had but, never-the less the graphics are still amazing to behold. The reflections are accurate and they jump around on the body of each car in their ecstasy, the lighting is well ahead of its time, casting a dynamic beam on every occasion, and the car models are a feat of graphical programming and design. The cars are well animated and feature some of the most top notch design ever seen in a game.

Along with all of this, the framerate is rock-solid with no hiccups what-so-ever and a constant smooth run of 60 frames per second. One other extremely satisfying gimmick is the "time of day" effect. When you start up the game it asks you to enter a time zone and then the game adapts all of its 3 cities (San Francisco, Tokyo and London) to that time frame. This makes for some amazing races, especially the ones that cross from a quaint sunset to pitch darkness or those in the early wake of dawn.

These graphics are nearly perfect, if only they would have more variety! There are only 3 cities, which are fairly well detailed none the less, but racing on the same pavement hundreds of times makes the game feel very blaze.

Sound: 7/10

MSR's soundtrack is utterly forgettable, sometimes even bordering on downright annoying. While there's a nice GTA-esque radio station feature, where each city has its own radio station with local DJs and even commercials, this easily gets boring as the same tracks get repeated again, and again, and again, especially at specific times in the day. The sound track is also very limited and, despite the inclusion of a jukebox, you'll just end up turning off the music as it can be really irritating at times.

On the other hand, the sound effects are about as good as they can get for a pre-GT4 game. The screeching of the wheels as they hit the pavement at 140 KM/H makes for a delightful orchestra in combination with the engine sounds. Oh, the engine sounds! They are perhaps the most accurate, well made, and competent engine sounds ever to be featured in a game! It's a true joy just to listen to it rev up at 3000-4000 RPM.

Gameplay: 7/10

During the first 2-3 hours of playing MSR I couldn't stop smiling: This game was damn near racing perfection! It was original, it was fast, and it was pretty. Soon enough however, my smile turned into a frown when I realized that in order to get a half-assed FIAT I had to repeat the same track hundreds upon hundreds of times.

MSR was the racing game to introduce the kudos system which encourages careful and spectacular driving. Of course, this being the first game to do this, found that the only spectacular thing was drifting! True to form however, the game also encouraged you to keep setting lower and lower time limits for yourself and to beat them in order to gain more kudos and move on. Technically, this would all be flawless... unless the kudos that you have to gather are out of this world! By the third league, I was spending upwards of 5 dozen tries on ONE race in order to take off 4-5 kudos off the mountain of kudos that was required to unlock the next race. To add insult to injury, these races take place mostly by yourself as you try to beat a time or pass that many cars in a given time limit. Given the draconic difficulty of this game, forcing you to do it all by yourself is way too much of a hassle. Unfortunately though, there's more. Every time you reattempt a race you lose ALL kudos from before, so a bad run will end up making all your work in VAIN! And trust me when I say this, a bad run can be as little as "flirting" with a wall.

This is all too bad because the AI in MSR is phenomenal. It's quite clear that this game spared none of SEGA's resources because AI as good as the one found in this game cannot be seen IN ANY racing game. The AI is capable of putting up a good fight, but it doesn't completely overwhelm you with being either too cheap or following perfect racing lines. However, it also isn't a push over and I don't know how many times I was utterly shocked by how well the AI pulled itself back and came from 4th-5th place to over take me. What's more, the AI does this without cheating! Looking in the mirror won't equate to seeing the AI as they suddenly "shift gears" and make up a 4 second difference in 300 meters. To this day, MSR has probably the best AI of any racer, ever made.

The racing model itself blurs the difference between arcade and simulation to a great extent. Racing isn't too simulation focused, as the aforementioned 140 KM/H turn can be taken without any problems and the car will come back from its extreme lateral acceleration without any penalties. Hell, more than once it will actually all you to PASS your opponents. On the other hand, that doesn't mean that flooring the brake within 10 meters of the turn will save your ass. Also helping the simulation is the inclusion of a huge number of licensed cars including Alfa-Romeo, Nissan, and Ford. Too bad that, much like other Japanese racers, this game features nearly NO European or American supercars. The exclusion of Ferrari, Masserati and Porsche should come as to no surprise, but the absence of Shelby Cobra or Chevrolet Corvette makes me wonder what exactly was the rest of the budget spent on. The only changes that can be made to cars are in the choice of colors, as none of the tweaking, upgrading or part-buying in other simulation is present. Unlocking the cars is done in the same way as playing through the rest of the game: The more kudos, the better the cars you get access to. This can become infuriating at times, especially when a car requires thousands of kudos to unlock and you're stuck using the same car for hundreds (literally) of races at an end.

MSR's tracks are very ho-hum. They certainly are well detailed and very well designed, featuring a good combination of straight-aways, hair-pin-turns, and tight-spots (not meant to offend) as well as wide open areas where passing is easier, but the tracks lack variety. The same 3 cities, backgrounds, and tilesets are present over and over again. The game never comes out of the city; there are no grassy fields, etc. Luckily however, unlike NFS: Underground games or other PGR games, the night/day cycles add a great deal to the variety of each track... but that's hardly enough to make a big difference.

Finally, MSR features quite a few modes, except the Street Racer mode (READ: Career). There's a quick race, where you can set ANYTHING from number of opponents, to car limits, to time of day making this mode one of the more complete quick race modes in the genre. There's also a time attack and multiplayer modes which are exactly what they sound like. Overall, the game modes are quite varied when compared to other games in the genre.

Multiplayer: 6/10

Again we have a DC racer with no online mode. WHY!?!?

The lack of online racing hurts MSR enormously as the 2-player mode is hardly more than a compilation of the quick race and time attack modes made for two players. While one could post their times in quick race on an online scoreboard, that's hardly and excuse for the utter lack of online multiplayer.

Overall: 7/10

If it wouldn't be for its draconic difficulty MSR would've been one of the most successful DC games ever. Sure, it doesn't have online multiplayer but it's really the game's difficulty that kills it. If someone happens to still be interested in this game, the biggest question they have to ask themselves is whether or not they're very likely to endure dozens and dozens of retries just to get 5-6 more kudos for the next race?

Answering that question will pretty much be the best recommendation one could get.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 11/07/05