 Review By: Jared Black |
Developer: | Yuke's Media Creations |
| Publisher: | Yuke's Media Creations | |
| Genre: | Racing | |
| ESRB: | Everyone | |
| # Of Players: | 1-2 | |
| Online Play: | No | |
| Accessories: | Memory Card, Driving Force & Driving Force Pro Steering Controllers | |
| Buy Now: |   |
Drift racing is undoubtedly the latest craze in professional racing, with appearances on ESPN2 and games and movies exploring the topic quite extensively. Gamers are still waiting on a decent simulation of the sport however, one that combines the relatively complex mechanics of drifting with a game that’s imminently playable. Most recently in my personal experience Tokyo Xtreme Racer DRIFT nailed the former, while Ridge Racer 6 nailed the latter, but neither game successfully combined the two. Unfortunately Yuke’s first self-published title, D1 Grand Prix, nails the mechanics and even carries the official D1 license, but fails miserably in the playability category due to a steep learning curve, touchy controls, and a lack of polish in other areas.
For those unfamiliar with D1, it’s an official league that allows top drifters from around the world to compete against each other in tournament style format. Winners are chosen not by who finishes first, but rather by who pulls off the coolest drifts and scores the most points. Drivers face off in one-on-one battles, alternating between taking the lead and trailing in three different rounds, with the top driver in each battle moving on to the next round.
For its part, D1 Grand Prix seems to have the mechanics behind drifting nailed down just right. In a nutshell, drifting is achieved when a car’s rear wheels have enough force applied to them to lose traction, resulting in the back of the car “sliding” through a corner. Points are awarded based on four factors: speed when entering a corner, the car’s angle during the drift, the distance of the drift, and finally the interaction between lead and trailing car on the course (such as the trailing car getting its nose in the lead car’s inside line). The game instructs you on how to do this in the game with a 45-minute or so tutorial mode, which unfortunately cannot be skipped. Although it is very informative and I did learn some things despite being familiar with the concept already, it did drag on far too long.
The problem is that even with a lot of practice, you’ll probably never feel in complete control of your car. Pulling off a successful drift is a complex feat involving several button combinations to begin with, but the controls are so touchy that the tiniest bit of oversteering, understeering, or braking can all result in a busted drift. Even when I thought I had the mechanics themselves nailed down, even the most basic of successful drifts were still entirely too hard to pull off.
As if that wasn’t enough, any drift points you may gain are lost at a rapid rate if you go off course, run into a wall, spin out, or even break off a drift too early while still in a turn. In fact, due to the nature of the league it’s even more of a problem than it was in Tokyo Racer Xtreme DRIFT. So if you fail even one drift that may or may not have been your fault, it has the potential to completely bust your entire tournament.
To the developers' credit they realized that it’s too hard, and actually tried to help out the player in several ways. There’s an Assist option that makes it easier to maintain drifts, but it also limits your angles and feels like virtual training wheels. An additional step between normal gameplay and the Assist mode, where it made the game a bit more accessible while still letting beginners feel like they were accomplishing something, would’ve been much better. You can also adjust car front and rear settings while using Expert cars, and the game’s overall difficulty supposedly (according to the manual anyway) gradually decreases the more you play until it’s closer to matching your skill level. The difficulty level decreases at such a slow rate though that it’s nearly impossible to tell what is the result of the game’s adjusting and what’s the result of your own experience.
So while the gameplay is merely tedious and frustrating, the commentary is torture. Three commentators do the honors, and each has no more than one or two lines for each general race result. So while you’re spending all of those hours trying to hone your technique and compete with the big boys, prepare to hear the same two or three combinations from each at the end of every race. The game isn’t nice about it either, with words like “Idiot” and “Chicken” flashing on the screen after bad drifts and the announcers indicating in no uncertain terms how they feel. Aside from that, sound is made up of typical car sounds and typical racing game music.
Graphically D1 looks pretty good for a PS2 racer, but that’s not hard to pull off when you only have a maximum of two cars competing on small chunks of larger courses. This includes some rudimentary damage modeling (bumpers come off of cars and such), and pretty good weather effects as well.
Bottom Line:
I totally understand what the developers were trying to do here, and in many ways they succeeded. Unfortunately, while D1 Grand Prix is faithful to the sport, it comes at the expense of accessibility. You simply can’t have loose controls in a game that requires precise control, and there’s nothing else here that really makes up for it.
Yuke’s is a good developer, so I’m willing to give them a pass on this title, and I'm still anxious to see what they do next as a publisher. Unfortunately, the end result of this game is that the search for a great, playable drift game continues.
| Pros: | Cons: | Final Score: |
|---|---|---|
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| 3.0 |
Posted: 2006-09-27 20:10:28 PST