Shutokou Battle: Zone of Control Hands-On

TOKYO--Genki's Shutokou Battle series goes back pretty far. The series is more commonly known for spawning games like Tokyo Xtreme Racer. The concept is pretty simple. You race against a rival, both cars have the equivalent of a fighting-game-style life meter, and the car in second place slowly loses "health." When one car's meter is empty, the race is over. Now, Genki is bringing the concept to the PSP.

The PSP version of the game is currently only 30 percent complete and it contains only a couple of cars, including an RX-7 and a Supra. The game only has the most basic of gameplay elements implemented at this time, so you can free battle against another car and watch your replay.

Even though the game is in the early stages of development, it's still worth noting that it delivers a pretty smooth frame rate. However, the sense of speed is really out of whack at the moment, making the game smooth but fairly slow. Even the inclusion of a turbo boost doesn't seem to help much.

Graphically, the car models in Shutokou Battle look nice; their edges are really smooth. The dark highways also look pretty good, but it seems like some of the textures on the road wobble around a little bit. However, there's certainly time for issues like these to be addressed.

The fans of the Shutokou Battle series tend to be pretty faithful, and so far, this portable take on the series also seems to be pretty faithful to the previous games. For more updates, be sure to check GameSpot's coverage of the Tokyo Game Show 2004.