Or is it Touge: King The Spirits? Or even just Touge King the Spirits…?
You can see why they changed the name to High Velocity for the US release.
To save wear-and-tear on my typing finger I’ll be referring to it as TKTS for the rest of this page.
This is basically the game of that bit in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift where you see the tail lights snaking up the mountain - only there’s just two cars in this particular snake.
The main game mode has you take place in 6 heats on each course where you battle a single AI competitor. On release this was chief among the complaints levelled at the game. But not all driving games should be judged equally. TKTS isn’t really a game in which the opponent is really the other car, the opponent is the track itself and beating each without bumping an alcove or fluffing a drift is the real challenge. It’s one of the few games I can think of where the Time Trial mode is every bit as fun as the campaign.
Three different courses based on real Japanese mountain roads are the stars of this game. There are also 6 vehicles all based (unofficially) on Japanese sports cars of the era but they are rendered in such low definition that it’s often only certain details that give them away; the front grill on the Skyline, the rear window on the MX5, the long bonnet of the Prelude.
So it’s these mountain roads, admittedly also fairly roughly hewn, that are what make TKTS worth your time, doubly so if you’re lucky enough to own the fantastic Saturn racing wheel.
If you’ve never played any of the Saturn's litany of racing games with this brilliant peripheral then it’s hard to explain just how much you are missing out, but I’ll give it a go: It turns F1 Challenge from a nightmare into one of the best racers on the machine, it makes Manx TT and Hang On GP 95 a pure joy as you sweep majestically through turns rather than juddering around bends like this is your first ride with the stabilisers off, and if you thought Virtua Racing and Daytona were good with a controller then prepare to have your mind blown.
The Saturn Racing Wheel is literally, LITERALLY, a game changer.
So to say that the glorious sweeping bends and tight hairpin corners are the stars of this game is a bit disingenuous, because without a deceptively technical control scheme and the racing wheel with which to master it, they wouldn’t shine quite so brightly.
Each course can be raced in both directions and although this is very common in racing games, the sheer level of elevation and road camber in TKTS means they are almost unrecognisable in clockwise and anticlockwise formats.
A course that begins with a screamingly fast descent through easy turns before it transforms into snaking, technical switchbacks as you climb slowly back up the mountain becomes a trudge to the summit in reverse mode, followed by a twisting descent wrestling against speeds and inertia far in excess of what the corners can handle.
And as I said before though, it’s the handling that makes the courses sing.
I have no problem with arcade racers where a simple lift off the throttle followed by a dose of counter-steer is all that’s required to fly around the sharpest of corners, I own every Ridge Racer game (except Vita) after all, but TKTS’ approach to drifting is more involved. It would be ridiculous to describe it as ‘realistic’ but compared to the likes of Ridge Racer, Sega Rally, even the various versions of OutRun 2 (all games I love) it may as well be iRacing.
You get into a drift in much the same way as most other arcade racers: a dab of brake or well timed lift as you turn into a sharp corner. Take the usual ‘gamey’ exit method though, ie floor it and counter-steer, and you’ll be sliding off the course in very short order. TKTS’ handling makes it necessary for you to manage the throttle carefully in the mid section of the corner, often requiring you to lift off entirely to bring the tail under control before flooring it again as the wheels line up at the exit. It’s just complex enough to avoid frustration, but more importantly it makes successfully stringing together three or four well executed corners truly satisfying. Nail every corner for two laps and you’ll feel like the one true Donkey Kong Drift King.
So what if the presentation is a bit rudimentary? Who cares if the music is bland and the sound effects basic? Who would give these tertiary issues a second thought when a game has courses with this much personality and a handling model as rewarding as any I’ve come across in an arcade racer?
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