Original Release: Activision, 2009, PlayStation 2
Other Releases: Nintendo DS (2009)

A simple racer that follows the general theme of the TV series with equally simple elements of upgrading beater cars and winning street races

MTV’s Pimp My Ride: Street Racing (PS2, Activision, 2009)

Where to Buy: Amazon

How to Emulate: PlayStation 2 Emulation Guide

Review by: C. M0use

Unless you’re a big fan of the mid-2000s Xzibit show, you’d likely not know that there were actually two Pimp My Ride games. The first was an oddball GTA derivative that had you drive around fulfilling customer car orders by ramming other random cars to make their coins fly out in Mario style, for whatever reason … “Street Racing” is the second game, which basically recycles the first game’s driving engine but retools it into a straight-up racing game with no “open world” elements to it.

The other oddity about this one is that it was released in 2009 for the PS2 and DS, a full two years after the show was canceled (and well into the PS3/Xbox 360 era). That means no Xzibit, in fact almost no real connection to the show save for using its logo and a modified version of its theme song.

All of that, plus it being a $20 budget title, seems like it would add up to almost guaranteed catastrophe … but surprisingly, it’s actually a solid little racing title. It’s definitely on the simple and limited side of town, and definitely a little out of date for 2009, but it kinda shoots for a “Gran Turismo lite” style with its heavy-and-realistic-ish handling, focus on everyday street racing and need to tinker with beaters to advance in the main career mode.

That said, don’t expect anything approaching Gran Turismo’s car count, level of detail or general depth. This is a $20 budget game, so it has no licensed cars whatsoever – just a collection of about a couple dozen kinda odd-looking knockoffs for you to gradually unlock and then customize. Aside from pretty decent overall handling, the big strength is a collection of pretty well-designed tracks; again only about a dozen though, with championship cups padded out by having “reverse” versions of each in the mix.

The “pimping” process also eventually opens up a decent range of visual options for the car, but is extremely straightforward. You earn “scrilla” from your racing ostensibly to buy stuff, but the championship races (the only place to earn it) also gradually unlock everything you need when you place 2nd and 1st in each race. So actually buying anything really feels like a waste of money until you get near the end of the game. Upgrading car performance parts is also a simple and straightforward process that is the same for every car. There’s a little more action in crafting the visual design of your car, at least after you’ve unlocked a bunch of parts and such through championship race wins, but one thing you can do from the beginning is create custom drawings for vinyl wraps and your own custom license plate. Unlike Gran Turismo, you’re also able to paint each of your cars whatever color you like at any time for free.

The racing kinda resembles Gran Turismo in general “realistic everyday car” handling and emphasis on braking properly around sharp corners, but it definitely differs in a number of ways. It’s much more gentle, for starters, with no need to come to grips with corner technique for the first few championship cups. There’s also only one AI racer who kinda rubberbands around you to maintain general challenge, the rest of the pack are losers who are easily dusted. There are also more arcadey elements, like speed boost pickups, off-track shortcuts and Dukes of Hazzard jumps. And since this is “illegal street racing” you have to deal with NPC traffic on nearly every track, but collisions are handled very gently; you can usually truck the Sunday drivers with little penalty, and a bad enough wipeout only costs you two or three seconds of drive time before you’re gently placed back on the track in Lakitu style. And while your car will show visible damage over a race you can’t actually hurt its performance or permanently wear or damage it.

So it’s kinda a good choice if you dig the general Gran Turismo style but wish the game would take it easy and relax more, you know, make an effort to be more arcadey and invitingly fun. The developers definitely seemed to be racing fans and put more effort into the core driving action and track design than was probably necessary for a late-PS2-life budget title.

Videos

Gameplay Video

Original Release: IGT, 2008 (?)

The sequel to one of IGT’s biggest slots looks very similar at a brief glance, but actually is a substantially different and more risky game

Cleopatra II (IGT, 2008?)

Review by: C. M0use

The sequel to IGT’s hit Cleopatra is decidedly more volatile, trading the frequent line wins of the first game for a more exciting (and potentially lucrative) bonus feature.

As with the previous game, the structure is kept very simple. You’re playing primarily to hit the bonus feature, which requires only landing three scatter symbols anywhere on the playfield (that your bet has covered). When that happens you get the standard 8 to 15 free spins, but with some unusual perks. First of all, the free spins can re-trigger if you land another three scatter symbols. And that seems to happen very often, as in my one run on the bonus spins I had it re-trigger five times for a grand total of over 60 free spins!

That’s not bad by itself, but the real heat of the meat is the fact that your win multiplier increases by 1x for each new spin. And I’m not sure what the cap is, if any, but on my 60+ spins it was up to 60-whatever by the time everything was said and done. This is mitigated somewhat by the fact that you’re still playing for the usual rare/crummy line wins during your free spin sequence, but once the multiplier gets into the double digits even the crummy wins can start getting substantial. Playing 20 cents per spin during my test run, the minimum to cover all lines, I ended up with a total of over $220 off my free spin sequence (most of that coming from a $100+ win late in the sequence). 100x your wager is about the best you can ask of a bonus feature that has a reasonable chance of popping each time you sit down!

That said, you’ll probably eat a lot of dead spins and crummy fractional wins in getting there. I got lucky and got to it within only about $10 of spins, but for that initial $10 it was starting to feel like the game was a big dud compared to its prequel. Aside from the crumbum and rare line wins, the only other thing to look for on the playfield is the Cleo II symbol. This acts as a wild, but also doubles the value of any payline it lands in. A screen packed with these might land you something like the potential 10,000x win you could get from the original Cleo with every spin, though I didn’t see a listed maximum for these.

So this isn’t a “grinder” like the original Cleo, something you could sit at for a long while with a small budget … if you don’t luck into a good bonus spin sequence you could see your money draining away pretty fast. However, it is another “true penny” (at least in its original cabinet) as you have the option of betting as little as 1 cent for just the center line or a nickel to cover 5 of the 20. So if you just wanna sit and chill for a while and maybe scoop a drink from the cocktail girl, it’s a choice. The other use case is the one I stumbled upon – deploying a small amount of free play that you don’t really care about losing for a shot at a very decent return if you luck out.

Videos

Gameplay Video

Original Release: Action Gaming, 2004, Web browser
Other Releases: Android/iOS (2018)

Run by Action Gaming, the kings of video poker in brick-and-mortar casinos for over two decades, the Videopoker.com website and apps allow for free play of their various games with a rewards system and contests for cash prizes

Videopoker.com (Web browser, Action Games, 2004)

Where to Buy: Free-to-play in a web browser

Review by: C. M0use

I’m filing Videopoker.com under “social casinos” but it kinda pre-dates the concept. I first started playing around with it in 2013, but it actually launched nearly 10 years before that (and hasn’t changed a whole lot in 20 years from a web design standpoint, as you might notice). It does have an actual social aspect in terms of a chat area and being able to post public messages to people (as well as adding an optional photo to your profile), and it has always had a “reward points” system for earning real prizes but one that doesn’t actually use or prompt you to buy virtual chips.

Previously, the big limitation was that the prizes were limited to branded swag and free premium subscriptions (aside from the ultimate prize, requiring an insane amount of points, being a free three-night trip to Vegas). After happening to check back in on it on a whim, I found they’ve since added substantial layers to it – the biggest being regular daily, weekly and monthly contests for cash prizes!

The site now distributes a total of at least $5000 per month between all these assorted free contests. It’s also not only expanded its video poker variants to around 100, it’s also added 12 types of keno … so I guess you can actually have the World Series of Keno here! (or at least a reasonable facsimile).

The whole thing is funded by Action Gaming, a longtime casino game designer that partnered up with IGT on their Game King series specializing in video poker and keno-focused terminals that allow you to select from a wide variety of simple games. If you’ve ever been in a live casino in the last 20 years or so, you’ve no doubt seen them; it’s often the only option on the floor for single-hand video poker. Videopoker.com is packed with the sorts of games you see on those machines, plus some titles that IGT/Action usually ship on their own separate cabinets like Ultimate X and Triple Play Draw Poker.

So the core feature of the site is simply playing all these video poker and keno games to your heart’s content, and earning one “reward point” for each hand you play. You don’t have to worry about managing a stack of virtual chips or buying new ones, but the site is monetized by showing a video ad of a few seconds whenever you switch to a new game type. That by itself doesn’t seem like a whole lot of a reason to play, save for trying out game types in advance of a casino trip or something; and back when I used to play this 10 years ago it really wasn’t, I mean there was the rewards factor but to give you an idea the cost of the free trip to Vegas is 3,000,000 points. So that’s why I wandered away from it initially.

But these new developments add a little more purpose. Item #1 obviously being the cash contests, though enough people are still playing this that you’ll basically need to land a royal (or similar super rare high-value hands) to stand a chance at winning even a daily for $25 or so. Each contest gives you a limited amount of daily tries, ranging from 5 to 10 usually.

The other thing is training, though you’ll need to pay for a Gold subscription (also purchaseable with reward points) to make use of that. I’ve long lamented the lack of good video poker trainers, with the ancient (but very good) Frugal Video Poker still kinda the top option in this area, and this one seems to have some good features (and they have a mobile app now so between that or just running in a web browser it would be simple to play on your phone). The premium subscription also eliminates the video ads, and promises to allow you to “play games before they hit casino floors”, though I couldn’t dig up any more detail on that … could actually be of value to advantage players if you can spot a weakness in a game they’re testing out before anyone else does, these games are not immune as several different Ultimate X vulnerabilities over the years have shown.

Original Release: Namco, 1995, PlayStation

The first original Ridge Racer game for consoles, Revolution didn’t do much to evolve and completely copied some tracks from previous games (along with recycling Ridge Racer 2’s soundtrack)

Ridge Racer Revolution (PS1, Namco, 1995)

Where to Buy: Amazon

How to Emulate: coming soon!

Review by: C. M0use

Ridge Racer is one of those series that went off the rails with its sequel naming right away. They did put out a Ridge Racer 2 in the arcades, but that was really just a tweaked version of the original game with a few added features. It just went bananas from there, if I’ve got it right the next game was “Rave Racer” in the arcades in summer of 1995, followed in a few months by Ridge Racer Revolution. So I guess this is the fourth game in the series, though actually the second for the PS1 as a port of the original arcade game had come out a few months prior as a launch title.

Whew! So anyway, Revolution kinda sucks. This was still in the period in which Namco was just iterating on the original game, which was always more of a graphical spectacle (by mid-90s “first wave of polygons” standards) than a quality or even “solid” racer. Same story here, it’s very colorful and really still looks pretty nice for a first-year PS1 release, but the gameplay remains plagued with herky-jerky movement, giant car hitboxes and the maddeningly random “drift” mechanic that is somehow even more annoying than in the first game.

It’s also very much still in an “arcade” mentality, with only three tracks available for the entirety of the game, and only four cars until you kill all 40 enemies on the little Galaga loading screen when the game starts (and then you get most of the rest of them). Same structure to the races as the first game – you start at the very back of the pack, the first five guys teleport ahead such that it’ll usually take to the final lap to catch up to them, the last five guys just sit neatly in their assigned position in life and try to put their ass in your way.

It’s annoying getting around the other cars as hitboxes are blocky and slightly larger than each of the vehicles, also there’s no going off-track at all (even into seemingly benign grass patches) or it counts as a collision and slows you down. But the worst offender is the random drift mechanic. In theory, it’s supposed to kick in when you tap the brake or ease off the gas then re-apply. In practice it just kinda kicks in whenever it feels like it, which probably won’t be on the corners you need it but will be on some straightaway where you let off the gas a little to try to weave around a fat-assed car. And surprisingly the cockpit view somehow gives you much more precision in this one, usually the opposite in racing games, the “chase car” view here seems to just expand all the hitboxes even more.

The only thing that held up is the colorful and detailed tracks with their fun background animations, otherwise the game is just primitive and even stuff like Driver and the first Gran Turismo make it look like a joke. Add in the taunting commentator with the annoying voice and it gets old fast. No real reason to go back to any of this crop of the early Ridge Racer games really.

Links

Original soundtrack

Videos

Gameplay Video

Original Release: PlayStudios, 2014, Android/iOS/Amazon

A basic blackjack game that ties into the MyVegas / MyVIP “real world rewards” system

MyVegas Blackjack (Mobile, PlayStudios, 2014)

Where to Buy: Freemium via Android/iOS app stores or Amazon

How to Emulate: Android Emulation Guide

Review by: C. M0use

MyVegas Blackjack is a smooth and pleasant basic blackjack app with some added benefits, chiefly the MyVIP / MyVegas rewards for playing, but also some major limitations in options.

If you’re not familiar with the MyVIP rewards world, it’s a family of about 10 mobile and Facebook “social casino” apps now that provide you with reward points for playing that can then be cashed in for an assortment of actual prizes. The program is tied in with MGM so a lot of those rewards are at their various casinos, but they’ve expanded over the years to a number of other partners like cruise lines and TopGolf and even some of that random Shaq branded merchandise.

You pay two prices for getting these reward points for free: advertising, and limited options. None of the MyVIP apps actually force any sort of third-party advertising, but they do frequently nag you to buy chips. Blackjack is actually one of the most restrained of the bunch, it just has a pop-up when you start it up and then it pretty much leaves you alone. It is one of the few that does allow you to voluntarily watch third-party ads for more chips, however.

As far as limited options, one is simply the amount of free chips doled out. You start with 25k and get about 5k per day just for showing up, and if you’re playing bets of 25 or 100 at single-deck with good conservative strategy that’ll hold you for a very long time. But initially you ONLY have access to a basic single-deck game and have to gradually unlock all the other game’s features by earning EXP from your bets: playing multiple hands, new rooms with new rules, side bets and so on.

Aside from earning rewards, the app does a few things to spice up the usual blackjack grind. Each new table you unlock has a set of 10 bonus cards to collect, which appear randomly with card draws. You have to win the present hand to keep them. Collecting the complete set gives you a huge EXP and money boost. At level 10 you also unlock the Strip quest; this isn’t like the My Strip you build in Facebook MyVegas if you’re familiar with that, it’s just a long chain of bonus objectives for more EXP and free chips (like winning a certain total of chips at a particular table).

Also on the theme of being overly basic, don’t expect any tutorials or play optimization tips here. You actually get sort of the opposite with a “charged bets” feature that offers some bonus chips if you keep making statistically not good plays during a hand. I guess it clues you in to what’s risky, but there’s nothing here to tell you what you could be doing better. There’s not much else to do aside from two slots you can unlock, both copped from MyVegas (Betrock Nights and Frontier Fortune).

Blackjack generally is not comped well in real casinos, and it’s definitely nerfed in the other MyVegas games that offer it … and that theme continues here as it’s one of the tightest of the app family about doling out the reward points. You’re capped to 4k per 24 hours and that’s strictly for about an hour of time-in-app (so you can sit there doing nothing if you want, so long as the screen stays active).
Still, it’s simple and straightforward, and it doesn’t have the problems with crashing and freezing on older devices that others (like MyKonami and the bingo game) now seem to be plagued with.

Videos

PlayStudios behind-the-scenes video

Gameplay Video

Original Release: Konami, 2020

A progressive slot that keeps some of Konami’s vintage elements but also introduces some modern features (and volatility). Available in both online and offline forms that are very similar.

All Aboard Dynamite Dash (Konami, 2020)

Review by: C. M0use

All Aboard Dynamite Dash is a slot released a few years ago that retains Konami’s classic 3×5 style, complete with its familiar symbols and a lot of the same sound effects, but expands the action to the then-brand-new “tall cabinet” Dimension 49J line that allows for an added bonus feature and linked progressive jackpot status screen on top.

One thing that’s different here is the volatility. Konami first made a name for itself on low volatility, graphically simple slots suited well to sitting and grinding with smaller bets for a long period (whether for loyalty points, free drinks or just something to do). Stuff like Lotus Land, Panda Express, Red Hot Chili Chochachos and etc. This one is quite the opposite; it sports very infrequent line wins, and you’re really hanging in for the bonus feature to choo-choo on in and catch you up. It’s also not the cheapest of the available slot options, at an absolute minimum bet of 50 cents per spin (1 cent to cover 50 lines).

At least on that front it does consistently deliver, when it finally does hit. To trigger the bonus you simply have to land at least six of the “gold train” scatter symbols in any position. This takes you to the usual series of three free spins that will fully re-trigger if you land another gold train symbol as they go. Manage to fill out the playfield with all 15, and you win the linked progressive jackpot. But even if you fall short of that lofty goal you’re still looking at a guarantee of a pretty big win. Unlike most of this particular style of bonus feature, whenever a new train symbol lands during the free spins, you get every credit on the playfield awarded to you again!

But, unless you get super lucky right when you step up to the machine, you’ll absolutely need that bonus feature win to offset the fact that you almost never get line wins and there’s really not much else helping you out here. Solid choice if you wanna go for the gusto with some free play you don’t mind potentially throwing away, though. My own experiment saw me going down the equivalent of $300 (at $1.20 per spin) before getting lucky with the bonus feature and recovering to a total profit of $600 after just hitting it once.

Links

Konami’s page

Videos

Gameplay Video

Original Release: Sony, 2001, PlayStation 2

The first Gran Turismo release for the PS2 stepped up the presentation as expected, but also improved the player experience a bit while reducing the overall car count. The gratuitous “A-Spec” subtitle is the base game, not a special version.

Gran Turismo 3 (PS2, Sony, 2001)

Where to Buy: Amazon

How to Emulate: PlayStation 2 Emulation Guide

Review by: C. M0use

Though I appreciated many of the qualities of the initial PS1 entries, and had some fun with some of the races and aspects, I left that console era with the feeling that “The Real Driving Simulator” wasn’t quite for me. It was mostly due to the constant feeling of having a little Japanese man behind you whacking you with a stick and yelling “NO THAT WRONG!!!” at every little deviation from “proper” racing technique, yet not providing you nearly enough in-game instruction as to exactly how that technique is supposed to work.

Gran Turismo 3, the entry that jumped to the PS2, still has some of that. But for me it was markedly more enjoyable and where things started to “click,” thanks to a fair amount of loosening of the “training gates” locking off the game’s content.

You do still have to pass the obnoxious license tests to access the majority of the Simulation Mode’s content. However, there is one important change: that doesn’t carry over to the Arcade Mode, it’s now wide open with nearly all of the game’s tracks and a broad selection of good cars right from the beginning. Not only can completing race sets in this mode furnish you with good cars to give you a boost in Simulation Mode, it also provides a more fun and free way to sort of teach yourself the finer points of the game. It certainly helped me a lot; I couldn’t even finish the bronze B licenses in the PS1 entries, but after a few hours futzing around in Arcade Mode here just having fun and picking things up on my own I pretty much breezed through all those trials (save a couple that took a few retries as I was falling like less than a second short of the required time).

Gran Turismo’s challenge really just boils down to two things: handling sharp corners with “proper” and realistic technique, and buying and tuning cars such that they out-muscle the competition on straightaways. That first component is by far the toughest part of the equation. If you don’t come in supplying your own race car driver knowledge, you aren’t getting it from the game, you’re just going to have to trial-and-error other than some occasional vague mumbled advice in a track description and a vague blue line overlay on the track that actually often isn’t the most helpful approach. I still wouldn’t call GT3 anything close to “arcadey,” but it does seem a little easier and less demanding on the handling than its predecessors. I can’t really come up with a concrete explanation for this but I think it may just be the generally improved physics in jumping to the PS2 hardware, combined with a controller that has a little more sensitivity to input.

The game’s one “arcadey” conceit is retained, and it continues to help in some races … your car is essentially invincible and free to ram other cars with impunity. That can be played to some strategic advantage, especially when using other cars as momentum sinks to carom off of while working your way up the pack and taking sharp corners. It’s less helpful when trying to maintain a lead, but on some tracks you can take advantage of the other cars driving “realistically” and attempting to avoid collisions by doing something they would never do like plowing across a patch of grass or two with enough speed to make a shortcut out of it.

Other than still having something of a demanding learning curve, complaints are minimal. The biggest one for series fans will probably be the drop in car count despite the move to DVD; GT3 has just 180 cars, only about 40 more than the original game and almost 500 fewer than its prequel! I don’t see much of a good explanation for this, other than maybe Sony trying to get it out close to the PS2 launch (it still ended up coming out a little over a year later). But it was an anomaly for the series, which would climb back up to 700+ cars with GT4 and then into the thousands with the following games. The other thing I didn’t care for was the soundtrack, which continues the theme of trying to license hot n’ popular tracks of the time. These things are always a product of their times and the early 00s was not a great time for pop music … you’ve got some Matrix kungfu techno, a cheesy promotional rap from Snoop Dogg, MOD SKILLZ, Lenny Kravitz stuff that’s beyond played at this point, Powerman 5000, Raekwon, a HUGE dose of Feeder for some reason … about the only thing I enjoyed was 80s classic “She Sells Sanctuary” tbh. The Japanese release continued with supplying its own original instrumental rock that’s pretty good, I think a few tracks made it into this version but with the DVD storage it would have been nice if you could switch to that as an option.

If you’re looking for an early entry point for the series, I think this is the place to start. Arcade Mode gives you a ton of stuff to do upon bootup with no gating, it looks nicer, it’s a little easier to come to grips with, about the only downgrade is the car count and soundtrack. It could stand to do a little more in teaching you what it expects given how it demands perfect execution in some aspects, but it also gives you much more room than the prior games to play around and figure it out for yourself in your own way. Also surprisingly still dirt cheap on Amazon and such, it looks like GT4 draws a lot more attention of the two PS2 entries.

Links

Basic ROM (ISO) editor for license test time settings, track data, CPU opponent stats, car prices and more

Retexture Mod

Concept Mod – Adds cars and courses from Gran Turismo: Concept

FAQs

Videos

Gameplay Video

Japanese TV ads

One of snooker’s legends gets something off an offhand treatment with this budget title, developed as a phone app and then dumped to the PSP later

Ronnie O’Sullivan’s Snooker (PSP, P1 Sports, 2012)

Where to Buy: No longer commercially available (discontinued with all PSP Minis in 2015), try Internet Archive

How to Emulate: PSP Emulation Guide

Review by: C. M0use

I’d never heard of Ronnie O’Sullivan prior to playing this, but apparently he’s been a dominant snooker legend since the 1990s and is still going today. I kinda wonder how the licensing conversation went for this one, though … “We’d like to make a video game about your life! For, uh … the PSP Mini. What other games have we made? Uhhh … have you heard of Phil Taylor Power Darts? It was, uh, for Nokia phones … yeah, you know, the old ones with the little screens. Well, anyway we did that and a poker game. Also for the Nokia phones.”

Well, none of this is poor Ronnie’s fault, but it’s just a weird and terrible budget game. The “main mode” has kind of an interesting structure for a celebrity-focused game, as you’re dropped into a series of major matches from Ronnie’s career dating back to starting out as a teenager, complete with a little text commentary from him on the situation. But the gameplay is a weird style I’ve never seen before in any kind of billiards game, more “strategy” than “action” if that makes sense.

So the first confusing thing, at least for me, was the setup of the pool table. All this time I’ve thought “snooker” was just another colorful UK colloquialism for billiards or pool, turns out it’s actually a distinct rule set with its own ball setup. Basically first you try to sink a red ball, then follow that with one of the other colors, and keep alternating. There’s always a helpful reminder of the next target ball in an upper corner, and with that you can pretty much figure it out on the fly.

The gameplay simply has you rotate through possible angles on the available ball with the L and R buttons, however, rather than allowing you to freely aim. This and adjusting the strike point of the cue gives you a map of exactly where the cue ball will head, and a more vague indication of where the balls it contacts are going. When you’re ready to fire off your shot, you manually adjust your preferred power level. I know some people don’t like stopping the sliding bars in these games so this might sound preferable, but I feel it takes away a core component of tactile involvement / arcade action that makes the game actually entertaining to play.

The end result is just plain boring and a little slow and clumsy. The whole thing made a lot a more sense when I got online to do background research for this review, learning this was first developed as an early iPhone app. So the control style was likely chosen deliberately to avoid arcadey interaction with those early touch screens, then later it was just kinda dumped haphazardly to the PlayStation Network to try to get a little more sales mileage out of it. Whatever the case, it’s not worth bothering with.

Videos

Gameplay Video

Original Release: Namco, 2006, PSP

Namco’s short-lived handheld branch of their MotoGP licensed games is basically just an inferior port of MotoGP 4

MotoGP (PSP, Namco, 2006)

Where to Buy: Amazon

How to Emulate: PSP Emulation Guide

Review by: C. M0use

Though it bears the title of the original game of the series, Namco’s PSP MotoGP release is apparently based on the 4th and final game (MotoGP 4) for the PS2. It was also the only handheld release for the early part of the series, and also the final release before Namco lost the license to THQ.

So I’m starting at the wrong end of this Namco branch of the series, but the PSP port still seemed like a fairly reasonable entry point as it’s self-contained and kept very simple. It incorporates some of the top racers of the time from the actual sport, though you’ll see nothing more than their names printed as every bike just has a generic rider model sat atop it.

From what I’ve read it’s pretty much a straight port of MotoGP 4, though with hobbled audio (what little music there is is utterly forgettable and sounds like it was licensed from a cheapo catalog). It’s not a game of panache and presentation, the main focus is meant to be realistic-feeling handling while also maintaining an arcadey aspect.

That former part is lost on me, I’m not a motorcycle rider. And coming to it from a car and kart racing background, the whole style of racing is quite different. Your bike gets to ludicrous speeds almost instantly, but far too fast to handle even the basic corners, which is apparently all about braking technique. Search me on that one because this edition of the game has absolutely no training or instruction on that aspect.

If that’s your situation, there’s no point in even venturing into Sim mode. This lets you play out a career as a rocketin’ racer, but you’re never winning a race without basically knowing how to keep a near-perfect racing line and absolutely never going off track or hitting anything. Arcade mode makes it easier to at least get into the middle of the pack with clumsy driving but you’re still not winning anything.

The game is thus just too Serious Business for me, who doesn’t really want to deal with anything more complex or with more of a learning curve than Hang-On. While it might suit serious riders and MotoGP fans better, this entry has fewer tracks than its console counterpart and offers no customizing of your bike or purchasing new ones. When the PSP was one of the dominant handheld options it might have been decent enough if you wanted a portable racer, but these days you’re more likely to just emulate a superior console version on the go. Aside from the four prior PS2 entries, a combination of THQ, Capcom and Milestone went on to make this a yearly-release series that stretches on to this day.

Videos

Gameplay Video

Original Release: Sony, 1999, PlayStation

The Gran Turismo sequel didn’t alter the core racing much but added more features and a whole lot more cars for the series farewell to the 64-bit era

Gran Turismo 2 (PS1, Sony, 1999)

Where to Buy: Amazon
How to Emulate: coming soon!

Review by: C. M0use

Sony’s second and last Gran Turismo entry for the venerable old PS1 didn’t really change the core formula or game engine, basically just added a boatload of cars (620 now, up from 180 in the original), an offroad “rally” dirt track racing mode and some little quality-of-life tweaks like breaking Simulation mode events out into smaller individual races and adding steering wheel support. Unfortunately that means it also retained some of the limiting niggles of the original game, chiefly the fussy licensing requirements to unlock the vast majority of the content.

Though this feature wouldn’t end up sticking for the rest of the series (probably unnecessary on the following generations of consoles), GT2 shipped in a two-disc case with the Arcade and Simulation modes each given their own CD. If you were around in the early 00s and remember a ton of these little fat cases around game stores at very low prices it is in part because they printed an absolute ton overall, but the first run was rushed to get the game out in time for Christmas ’99 and came packed with a couple of glitches that could wipe your save files. Another run was released in 2000 that fixed this and it was also cleaned up for the later “Greatest Hits” release.

I started off with Sim Mode since that’s the real meat of the game. Unfortunately, you quickly run face first into my biggest complaint with the prequel: the vast majority of its content locked off behind hard, fussy, time-consuming license tests that often stress teaching things that are completely unnecessary and useless for the casual gamer just looking to have fun. Without doing at least the introductory “B” license, which requires 10 slow and tedious tests of dumb things you’ll never need like “brake just after crossing the finish line within some fussy zone,” you only have access to three of the lowest-level races on three tracks.

The license tests are the most egregious offense, but overall it’s just not the most user-friendly design. In Sim Mode you’re dumped off to the game menu with $10,000 to buy a used car to start off with … problem is, there are dozens of dealerships just scattered about and there’s no real way to evaluate car quality unless you’re familiar with them already in real life. The Arcade Mode shows a basic rating for each car in three core stat categories, but this doesn’t appear in Sim Mode for whatever reason. Add in the menus kinda loading slow and being a bit clumsy to navigate, and you don’t have the best user experience outside of the races.

Hop over to Arcade Mode for more immediate fun, and you do get a small selection of the game’s nicer sports and high-performance cars to pick from right away … but also only the starting three tracks, until you go back over to Sim Mode and do your license homework. This kind of gating is crazy to me and I can’t believe it didn’t hurt the game’s reputation more.

The core racing action is very similar to the prequel, realistic in the vehicle details and handling but not at all in collisions with seemingly a thin force field membrane around the car protecting you from damage at all times. I’m not complaining, I actually like this style quite a bit, especially in Sim Mode as I don’t want to deal with car damage and wear-and-tear. You can focus entirely on the racing. The game does have blatant rubberbanding but it seems to favor you much more than the computer overall, if you spin out they really slow down to let you get right back in the race.

Once you struggle through the annoying licensing requirements, or just take the sane path and use Action Replay codes or download a save file, both discs are just a straightforward routine of winning races with Sim adding the aspect of earning money to buy new vehicles and upgrade parts. Everyone has their own strategies but what worked for me to get started in Sim is picking up a used Toyota Supra GT for around 5,000 as your first car, which fishtails when the wind blows but has the raw horsepower to just blow away the initial junk cars you race, then use the winnings from the first two or three races to upgrade to a used Mitsubishi Lancer Evo for around 15,000. I didn’t really see a point to upgrading these initial beaters at all but maybe experts will disagree with me, I dunno.

As far as aesthetics, obviously PS1 3D graphics are badly dated now but in 1999 this was as good as you were getting from a console for both car models and detailed track backgrounds. It’s a level of effort that still retains some appeal even if the polygon technology is now very quaint. After encountering the memed-but wonderful Blue Line instrumental from Keiji Matsumoto, I was expecting the game to have a similar jazz soundtrack throughout … which it kinda does in the menus, but the original Japanese OST has a lot of instrumental rock on the tracks and then for the international release they licensed some popular pop/rock tracks of the era. It’s not bad stuff, heavy on the better end of 90s grunge, but there’s only like 10 total tracks and they get pretty repetitive pretty quick (Stone Temple Pilots: “I’m gonna learn ya my philosophy …. I yam I yam I yam I yam Popeye”).

Between the overly demanding and restrictive license testing system, the dated graphics, limited soundtrack, and slightly janky menu navigation, there isn’t a lot of reason to come back to GT2 despite it being the most comprehensive and detailed racer for auto enthusiasts of the pre-Millennium era. If you do you’ll probably want to go straight for fan mods, of which there are a surprising amount still being released to this day (linked below). The one advantage I could see over not just jumping to the later generations is that you can emulate PS1 games on any old potato device you can scratch up.

Links

GTPlanet board

Project A-Spec mod – Fixes bugs, restores cut content, adds new cars and events created from scratch

Gran Turismo 2.1 mod – Improves opponents, cuts rubberbanding, physics fixes, updates graphics and sound, adds some new cars

Save file that just unlocks the licenses and nothing else

Gameshark codes to unlock all Gold licenses (and other neat stuff from the Old Internet)

Videos

Gameplay Video

Bleem! Dreamcast version of the game