"Xtreme venom, no mercy when we all up in 'em"

On the nighttime streets of a major city, racers gather to drive powerful, souped-up beasts in illicit competitions to prove their worth. Sound like The Fast and the Furious? No, this takes place in Tokyo, not Los Angeles, and it's not a movie, it's a video game. This is Tokyo Xtreme Racer for the Dreamcast. However, the game has much of the feel of Fast and the Furious, and the import cars visible in the movie are the same ones used by this game.

In this kind of street racing, the combatants are sinking thousands of dollars into their cars not for widespread recognition, but for personal pride. Thus, you are not looking to shatter speed records but to match, and exceed, the performance of your competitors, and embarrass them in front of the racing community while establishing your premiere standing.

Destroying a foolish challenger off the line will often strike fear into him and send is home with his muffler between his legs. And an opponent who loses by a hair just at the line will certainly not feel beaten. Xtreme Racer reflects this by throwing out the race clock and instead granting each racer a full health bar at the start of the race. Really, though, this bar is more of a pride gauge. When you are leading, your enemy's bar steadily empties as the red flush of humiliation mounts his cheeks, and the greater your lead, the faster his gauge will deplete--but if he takes the lead, the same things will happen to you. Eventually, one player will be shamed to nothing, and the race will be over. In the Versus mode, you can choose either this, or a normal one-lap race with a finish line. The single-player mode, the enthusiastically-named Quest Mode, exclusively uses this means of determining a winner.

This advantages of this system are apparent. Having just finished a lengthy stint of Gran Turismo before picking up this title, I was pleased that easy victories were not drawn out while I completed the requisite five or ten laps; here, a vastly inferior opponent will very quickly realize the mistake of getting onto the road with you to begin with, and hand over his $100. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you never see the nose of another car pull up on your right to beat you at the finish line, an experience which is always heartbreaking. If you can stay right with the other guy, the race will go on and on until one of you makes a move or a mistake. The best of both worlds is achieved by drawing out the high-tension, tire-on-tire races, and minimizing the less interesting routs and frustrating blowouts.

The whole game takes place on one giant map, which is that of Tokyo's highway system. This means that many other non-racers are sharing the street with you, and navigating the vans and compacts is a major part of the gameplay. While there is one area where two paths are available, this is essentially not a true city map with grids of streets, but one giant loop of highway, equivalent to a city beltway.

Drivers can race this loop in two directions, but you may only change direction by ending your night of racing and returning to the menu, and even with a reverse mode the single track provides a deplorable lack of diversity to the game. Part of the joy of a racing game comes out of mastering the ins and outs of many varied tracks--see Gran Turismo--and Xtreme Racer lacks this. Not only does the single track reduce the options available to the player, it also makes the game visually boring. As you drive along the dark, streetlight-illuminated highways, you see the same tall buildings rising up alongside the elevated thoroughfare over and over again. These buildings seem pasted onto the night backdrop, almost like magazine cutouts glued onto black construction paper, rather than the spectacular night skyline Tokyo certainly offered for the designers to reproduce.

With only one track, Xtreme Racer needs something to keep you busy, and in Quest Mode, this will be the 137 different opponents you must beat to be crowned King of the Streets (my affectation, not the game's). As you beat them, you acquire monetary prizes which allow you to upgrade or replace your vehicle, and as your reputation grows, new challengers will emerge to face you. Some racers are organized into gangs and the leader will emerge after you defeat every underling, but the most powerful foes like Raven Blood and the Four Devas will not emerge until you have plowed your way through nearly every other racer. At most six other racers share the street with you each night, so defeating all 137 opponents will occupy you for many hours. The variety of the racing community is well-presented by the Rivals menu,. which allows you to scroll through an information screen for every racer you defeat.

At some point in any racing review, the issue of cars must be addressed. Xtreme Racer does not in fact have any licensed featured brands. Instead, it steals the car exteriors and gives them different names without a manufacturer's logo. While this works for unlicensed football games that call Brett Favre #4, very few people will be able to recognize and distinguish these cars without a name attached. Names like AE86T and RPS13 are frankly unappealing, but the best cars in the game have unique names like Vibe and Back Burner, and unlocking them is a major goal of the game. Considering the magnificent detail put into these cars, it is unfortunate that no license was acquired--after all, the manufactures in question are Nissan, Honda, and Toyota, not Ferrari or Lamborghini. How expensive could the name have possibly been?

The single X in ''Xtreme'' is intended to signify that this is no game for the faint of heart--this is the kind of heart-accelerating action that could short-circuit your grandfather's Teletronics Pacemaker. In reality it's not much different from most other racing games, though it does offer a rather intense kind of head-to-head competition more often associated with fighting games. A more polished and complete game surrounding this idea would have been welcome, but the seed itself is worth quite a lot and give Xtreme Racer something to be proud of over its competition.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 12/10/02, Updated 04/10/03