Auto Modellista

"One hell of a good console racer..."

I am a fairly big fan of racing games. I've played every racer on PlayStation and PlayStation 2 and this one comes near the top of my list of best racers. This game takes on the traits of both racing sims (i.e. Gran Turismo), arcade racers (i.e. Initial D), and online and blends it into one beautiful gelatinous glob of racing pleasure.

Gameplay 8.5/10
Auto Modellista has several gameplay modes to choose from. These include Garage Life, Arcade, VJ Theater, and Network. Garage Life is similar to Simulation mode in Gran Turismo 3 in a way. There you can tune your cars with parts you win in races, decorate your garage with things you win in races, change cars and store cars in a garage, and a few other things. In tuning, you can also visually modify your cars with tail spoilers, body kits, paint jobs, rims, and decals. You also participate in a series of racing tournaments. There are 7 levels of tournaments in all. Winning these tournaments allows you access to new car models, more car parts, a few new modes, and various accessories for your garage. To be honest, there aren't enough these races in the single player game to play through it more than twice. Once you've gone through it, it's not a whole lot of fun to do it again. Arcade mode is just the same as arcade mode in other racers; it has a VS mode, single race mode, and a time attack mode I believe. The VJ Theater allows you to take saved replays from previous races and mess with them. You can add different kinds of music, visual effects, and a bunch more. It can be confusing at first but you get the hang of using it after a while. Sadly, as far as cars go, there really isn't that wide of a selection. Don't get me wrong, there are dozens of cars in the game. The problem is that there are only Japanese manufactured cars, such as Suzuki, Honda, Nissan, and Mitsubishi, and a few American manufactured cars, such as Ford, Chevrolet, and Dodge, included in the game. That means no Ferrari, no Lotus, no McLaren, no Mercedes, and no BMW. I really have no idea why they didn't include these other big names in racing. Maybe they couldn't get licenses or something. Anyways, the gameplay score would have been higher if they had included some European manufacturers.

The control scheme for Auto Modellista is pretty standard and it works. X button is the gas, square the brakes, L1 and R1 the gears, and D-pad/left analog stick the steering wheel. The other buttons do stuff too, but the above is all you really need to know to race. As far as the actual racing, the game plays well. The handling leaves a bit to be desired if you prefer realism but does just fine if you prefer arcade-like racing. There are a number of tracks to choose from in the game, ranging from F1 circuit type courses, to dirt tracks, to urban street tracks, to ridge tracks, to circular tracks. All of the tracks can be run in reverse or normal. They even have one track that is in rainy conditions. Overall, this game plays very well, the handling and the lack of non-Japanese and American car manufacturers being the only real problems.

Graphics and Sound 8/10
From a graphical standpoint, Auto Modellista is revolutionary in the console racing world. It is the first racing game on consoles (and PC as well I believe) to use 100% cel-shaded graphics. For those of you who don't know what cel-shaded graphics are, they are best described as cartoon-like. The whole game looks like one big anime cartoon. This does bring down the realism of the game, something which drives many people away from it. Despite this, the cars in the game are accurately made after the real cars, they just look cartoony. The different tracks themselves are mostly modeled after real life tracks in Japan and they look pretty good. In my opinion, the rain effects are done well considering the limitations of cel-shading. There are other neato graphical effects as well. Big yellow sparks fly when you hit walls and other cars, yellow sparks fly out of tailpipes when the engine backfires, and white clouds of dust, smoke, and steam shoot from your tires as you make hard turns down the track. Pretty cool actually.

Music in Auto Modellista leaves a tad to be desired. It really isn't the kind of stuff I like to listen to so I usually wear headphones and listen to music of my choice during races. Some of the in-game music is techno-like and some is more rock-ish. But I really don't care for the selection. They play different music for different parts of the game; one kind of music for the car selection part, one for the garage part, one for the mail part, and so on. While the music isn't all that great, the sound effects are well done. There are bangs as a engine backfires, bumps and more bangs as you hit things, different engines make different sounds and they also make different noises when you tune them differently, the screeching of tires, the whoosh of wind as you whip down the track, and so on. In my opinion, the sound effects for Auto Modellista are really done well.

Online Play 7.5/10
Network mode is online (if you didn't make that connection). First thing you should know about the online game is that it is for broadband users only. It does not support narrowband users. In online mode you can race with up to 8 people on any of the tracks in the game. You can use the cars that you modify in Garage Life mode and you can form teams with other racers. Daily high scores for all the different tracks are posted on the Capcom site daily. There is also a chat-room like feature online where you can talk to other racers and show off your cars. The online mode isn't too bad but it does have some problems, the largest of which is cheap wall-bangers. A lot of people online think it is cool to get some mega-turbo horse power monster car and run full throttle down the urban and circuit tracks. Their strategy works because of some glitch in the game that gives you a sort of a boost if you hit the wall at the right angle which allows you to never let your foot off the gas. This pisses off all of us fair racers who just want to have a nice clean race. Due to this, all the good drivers who don't practice wall-banging are pretty much restricted to the ridge races where wall-banging is pretty difficult to do. If the game had a voting system similar to that of SOCOM it would greatly help the problem. So the online play of Auto Modellista has it's ups and downs.

Overall 8/10
In the end, while the game has its problems, Auto Modellista is a fairly good racing game. Online play is flawed by cheap racers and a lack of options for online play. The music is lacking in volume and selection. The car selection is also greatly lacking in my opinion. Lastly, the sheer lack of single-player replay value is another problem that haunts the game. Despite its problems, Auto Modellista is a very good start for Capcom in the world of console racing. Hopefully in the future, Capcom will learn from the mistakes it made on this game and fix them in possible sequels to the game. As far as the rent or buy issue, I would suggest that even the most diehard racing fans rent this game before buying it. If you like it, and you have a Network Adapter for online play, I strongly suggest that you buy it. If you don't have the luxury of broadband online connectivity, then you probably should stick to renting the game.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 04/19/03, Updated 04/23/03