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Enthusia Professional Racing Updated Hands-On - Career Mode, AI, and Driving Revolution

We take an almost-finished North American version of Konami's upcoming racing simulation for an extended test-drive.

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Already available in Japan and currently scheduled for release in North America on May 3, Enthusia Professional Racing is a PlayStation 2-exclusive racing game that, at first glance, could easily be mistaken for a Gran Turismo clone. Since we recently spent some quality time with an almost-finished version of Konami's game, however, we can report that the two are actually very different. We can also report that Enthusia offers some of the most enjoyable and challenging races we've played in a long time, thanks to both its realistic car handling and the mostly believable behavior of the CPU drivers you'll be competing against.

The cars available to you at the start of your Enthusia life are nothing special.
The cars available to you at the start of your Enthusia life are nothing special.

The gameplay mode in Enthusia Professional Racing you'll undoubtedly be spending the most time with is the "Enthusia life" career mode, which challenges you to take your driver ranking from 1,000 to number 1. You'll start out with a collection of 12 less-than-mediocre cars with which to achieve this goal, and you'll stand a good chance of adding another car from the game's roster of more than 200 to your collection every time you compete. If you drive well, meaning that you don't spend your time bouncing off other cars and using walls to get around corners, you'll also earn skill points that, not unlike experience points in most role-playing games, let you and your current ride "level up." When you, as the driver, level up, you'll notice that a number of your attributes (none of which affects your actual performance on the track) are improved. When one of your cars levels up, it'll receive a performance boost in the form of a weight reduction, a power increase, or better tires. Cars start out at level one and max out at level 10, by which time the improvements made will be quite noticeable.

Enthusia, then, is a game that takes simplifying the process of car tuning to a whole new level, even if earning the points necessary to improve your cars can be very challenging. Enthusia's points systems (plural) are actually quite complex. So if you feel like skipping the remainder of this paragraph, the one thing you really need to know is that Enthusia punishes you for driving like an idiot, even if you end up being first across the finish line. There are three types of points in the Enthusia life mode: Enthu points, ranking points, and skill points. Enthu points are comparable to a health meter that takes a hit every time you make contact with another vehicle or trackside object or when you even just stray off the circuit for a second. Your upper Enthu points limit, and the rate at which you recover points between races, will be determined by your current level. And if your Enthu points ever reach zero, you'll be forced to miss your next race. Ranking points, unsurprisingly, are used to calculate your current ranking, which can be anywhere from one to 1,000. Your ranking is always based on the best nine races you've had in the last 12 weeks, and the ranking points you earn for each race are determined not only by your result, but also by the difficulty of the race, according to the game's odds system. Skill points are essentially a combination of Enthu and ranking points, since the number you're awarded after a race is determined by subtracting points for collisions and such from a number that's based on your race result and difficulty.

Justifying the use of more-powerful cars is actually more difficult than unlocking them.
Justifying the use of more-powerful cars is actually more difficult than unlocking them.

The upshot of the various points systems is that the only way you're ever going to earn yourself a number one ranking is to win races that, on paper, you have no business even entering with an inferior car. However, you've got to win these races without making any mistakes. Winning a race behind the wheel of the most powerful car on the starting grid, for example, might net you a couple hundred points if you're lucky, while beating bona fide racecars in an underpowered compact will almost certainly earn you more than a thousand points. The odds system is ingenious in that it encourages you to make the races challenging for yourself (unlike Gran Turismo, which challenges you to make the races easy for yourself), but it's also frustrating because it basically means that climbing into the best car in your collection is a bad idea as far as your career progression is concerned. The Enthusia life mode even forces you to miss a race if you decide to switch cars, which, given the nature of the aforementioned ranking system and the fact that you never really know which races you'll be offered from one week to the next, seems a bit harsh. Despite having a number of desirable sports cars in our Enthusia life collection, we've actually spent most of our time thus far racing in an old Mini Cooper that was available right from the start, simply because the potential rewards are much greater when your car is the least powerful one in the race.

Accidents Happen

Surprisingly, beating more-powerful cars from manufacturers like Jaguar, Lotus, Mitsubishi, Toyota, and Honda in our Mini hasn't always proven as difficult as you might expect. The nature of the track that's being raced has an impact on the outcome, of course, because it's a lot harder to keep a superior car behind you on a wide straightaway than it is on a tight corner. However, some of the results we've achieved (driving far from perfect races) border on being unbelievable. One of the things we've been most impressed with in Enthusia Professional Racing, during our time with it, is the behavior of the other drivers, who race competitively with one another--as well as with you--and aren't above making the occasional mistake (which can, frustratingly, cost you Enthu points if you happen to get hit). Stick them in a vastly superior car, though, and you can't help but feel that some of them are deliberately hanging back so as not to make you feel badly.

There are no damage models in Enthusia, but that doesn't make it any less challenging.
There are no damage models in Enthusia, but that doesn't make it any less challenging.

With that said, Enthusia Professional Racing isn't an easy game to master, especially if you have a penchant for the rear-wheel-drive cars we've found to be much less forgiving than their front-wheel-drive and four-wheel-drive counterparts. There are no damage models, but the handling of each and every car feels extremely realistic. And if you try to take corners too fast, you'll invariably end up hitting something on your way around or losing precious seconds while your tires struggle to regain some grip, squealing and smoking all the way. The CPU opponents in Enthusia are very efficient when it comes to capitalizing on your unforced errors, which makes it all the more satisfying when you're able to turn the tables on them. The end result when all these things are considered, and perhaps one of the most flattering things we can say about Enthusia at this point, is that many of the races you take part in play out a lot like you'd expect them to in real life. You might battle for position with the same car for multiple laps, for example, or you might throw away a convincing lead with just a single mistake.

Enthusia's tracks, incidentally, are about as varied as those in any other racing game we can think of. There are more than 50 in total, including street circuits through caricatures of major cities. There are real-life race circuits, such as Tsukuba and the Nurbrugring, and off-road courses that take you across a desert and through a network of caves. The environments the courses are set in are every bit as varied as the challenges they present, and any time you choose to race the same circuit over and over again--because you think you're especially good at it--you can guarantee you'll be asked to do it backwards.

At the end of every Enthusia life race, provided you finish in a points-scoring position (usually fourth in a field of six is good enough), you'll have a chance of winning one of your opponents' cars in the "rival raffle." This unusual system basically presents you with a list of the cars you can win. It highlights each one of them (in turn) in rapid succession and challenges you to stop the highlight over the car you want to add to your collection. The highlight doesn't stop instantly, though, and in addition to each of the cars, there's an empty slot offscreen that, if your highlight ends up there, means you don't get anything. It's basically like playing reds and blacks on roulette and praying the ball doesn't land on green. We frustratingly managed to win eight races in a row without unlocking a single car on one occasion, though odds suggest this should be a rare occurrence.

Gran Turismo license tests meet Konami's Dance Dance Revolution series.
Gran Turismo license tests meet Konami's Dance Dance Revolution series.

When you're not living your Enthusia life or competing with friends in the two-player split-screen mode, you'll most likely be checking out Enthusia's innovative "driving revolution" mode. If you've been following our previous coverage of Enthusia Professional Racing, you'll know that driving revolution is (very) loosely based on Konami's Dance Dance Revolution games, although it could also be compared to some of Gran Turismo's license tests. Basically, you're required to drive through a series of slalom gates without crashing or missing any. Each of the gates needs to be passed through at a certain speed, and some of them also serve as markers for when you should be accelerating or braking, if you're going to make it through the subsequent gate successfully. The driving revolution mode starts out ridiculously easy but gets challenging pretty quickly, especially since the slalom gates often require you to deviate from what would usually be considered the racing line.

As you've probably gathered, we've had a lot of fun with Enthusia Professional Racing, and we're really looking forward to getting our hands on a finished version. Losing Enthu points when other drivers crash into you is frustrating, and using easy races on the game's Speediapolis oval circuit for RPG-style "power leveling" gets old pretty quickly, but overall, we've been impressed with the package Konami has put together. Expect a full review of Enthusia Professional Racing closer to its release.

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