F355 Challenge Preview

When Yu Suzuki's F355 Challenge released to US arcades last year, speculation about a Dreamcast port instantly began circulating among gamers. But a lot of questions and doubts were raised when a press release from Acclaim hit the wires last September claiming that the company had won the Ferrari license, and that it would be bringing the arcade hit home to Dreamcast owners later the following year. Why would Acclaim and not Sega publish F355 Challenge for the Dreamcast? Strangely enough, the mysterious press release was immediately pulled from the Web, Acclaim cited an internal error for its publication, and the incident was forgotten.

It should have come as no surprise, then, when Acclaim publicly unveiled a playable version of F355 Challenge for the Dreamcast at this year's E3 in Los Angeles. At first glance, the game seemed like a direct port of the Twin Type arcade cabinet (the more popular DX Type has three monitors running in tandem for a panoramic view), complete with all the same modes, tracks, and, more importantly, the exact graphics. But after Acclaim recently dropped off a copy of the game at the GameSpot offices, we were surprised to find that F355 Challenge for the Dreamcast has even more options and modes of play than either of its arcade predecessors.

Included in the game will be an exact port of the arcade game, without the other two monitors, of course, as well as several additional modes that enhance the original arcade game. Five additional modes of play will ship with the Dreamcast version of F355 Challenge when it is released later this year, as well as several other options designed to take advantage of the console's Internet capabilities. We'll take a detailed look at all these upcoming options in our detailed preview of the game. Let's start with an overview of the car whose name graces the title of the game.

The F355 Challenge

The first car in the Ferrari Challenge series was the 1993 special version of the 348 two-seat road car, aptly named the 348 Challenge. The car was factory-built by Ferrari specifically for race enthusiasts, and it included a number of performance upgrades that ranged from tighter suspension to a beefier exhaust system. In 1995, the Challenge series was expanded to include the F355, which was released in its original street-legal form in the previous year. The F355 wasn't only faster than the 348, but it also handled turns with an air of confidence not found in the uninspiring 348 and addressed the maintenance problems that plagued its poorly designed predecessor. Needless to say, the F355 Challenge car easily outpaced its 348 Challenge counterpart.

In 1998 the performance gap between the two race cars widened even further with the debut of the F1 transmission in all F355 models, including the Challenge. Originally pioneered by Ferrari in 1989 for use with the company's F1 race car, the F1 gearbox replaces the standard clutch-and-stick transmission with a pair of paddle shifters that straddle either side of the steering-wheel column. The transmission is shifted to a higher gear by pulling on the right paddle and downshifted by pulling on the left. Instead of a clutch, the F1 transmission automatically detects when the driver is shifting and electronically cuts off fuel to the engine for one-tenth of a second. This process of shifting is significantly faster than a standard manual transmission, and, as a result, every F1 team has since adopted this technology.

Sega's F355 Challenge arcade cabinet features both a standard transmission (complete with a six-gear gearbox and a working clutch pedal) as well as a pair of F1 paddle shifters. The game was essentially designed to make you a better driver. It features six increasingly challenging tracks, as well as three difficulty settings: novice, intermediate, and professional. The novice setting provides drivers with the best "driving line" to follow on each course, and it gives audio and visual queues for braking, steering, and shifting. At the end of the session, the cabinet dispenses a printout that rates your driving capabilities and points out the mistakes that you made throughout the track. As you become more comfortable with driving the F355 Challenge, you can move on to more challenging modes that take away some of the driving assists and let you drive against the clock as well as up to seven other computer-controlled opponents. Eventually, you can graduate from the tame automatic F355, past the nimble F1 transmission, and all the way to the unruly manual transmission, all while becoming increasingly skilled in the art of closed-circuit racing.