Enthusia Professional Racing Updated Hands-On

At a Konami press event in San Francisco earlier today, Manabu Akita, senior producer at Konami's Studio 3, revealed a number of new details about the game that he's been working on for the last three years, Enthusia Professional Racing for the PlayStation 2. Akita began his presentation by stating that he had two primary goals for Enthusia when he started working on it: to create the most realistic driving game to date and to introduce a number of new innovations to the genre. Based on what we've seen of the game thus far (and today in particular), we'd say that Akita and his development team are on track to achieve both.

For starters, Enthusia's much-touted Visual Gravity System (VGS) has been refined since the last time we saw the game, and it now incorporates tire grip meters and a "G-ball" that moves around an image representing your chassis, quite clearly indicating the direction of the G-forces you'd be experiencing if you were in the driver's seat. There were a number of different VGS display options available in the build of Enthusia that we played today, and we found the arrows that appear to the left and right of your car, when playing the game with a camera positioned behind the vehicle, are the most useful. The arrows indicate in which direction and to what extent your vehicle's chassis is rolling to one side, and we found that if we kept them under control, we could take corners at speed (and we could even slide around a couple of them) much more easily.

Perhaps the most exciting innovation in Enthusia Professional Racing, though, will be the previously unannounced "driving revolution" mode, which, somewhat bizarrely, takes its inspiration from Konami's ever-popular Dance Dance Revolution series of rhythm games. The premise of the new mode is actually quite simple: As you drive around one of the game's 50-plus circuits, you'll see graphics that can perhaps best be described as slalom gates. The gates aren't physical objects that can be collided with, but your goal will be to drive through every single one of them without ever straying from the track that you're driving on.

There's a bit more to it than that, though. Each of the gate graphics incorporates a horizontal line that slides up and down according to your speed, and to achieve a "perfect" score (as opposed to a great, bad, or miss) for a gate, you'll have to pass through it at the correct speed (as indicated by the line being right in the middle). A number of the gates will also incorporate simple graphics warning you that you'll need to either brake sharply or accelerate to meet the requirements of the next gate. We had a chance to play through the first dozen or so revolution stages and found them to be both challenging and enjoyable, although perhaps vaguely reminiscent of other driving games' tutorials and license tests.

Other new Enthusia Professional Racing features that were announced today included an odds system that gives you some indication of which opponents will be the biggest threats to you before each race, ranking points that let you know how close you are to achieving your goal of becoming the number one driver, and "enthu" points which, as far as we can tell, serve as some kind of health bar for your vehicle. (Note: You'll end your race if these points drop to zero.) When you're not losing enthu points, you'll attempt to rack up skill points that, since money has no role to play in the game, serve as currency when it comes to tuning your cars. You won't have a garage of cars that you own, or anything like that, incidentally. You'll simply start the game with approximately 50 of Enthusia's 200-plus cars available to you, and you'll unlock more as you progress through the "Enthusia life" career mode.

The Enthusia life mode will employ a race calendar that, provided your ranking is high enough to qualify you for entry, will let you compete in a number of different race types in chronological order (as opposed to forcing you to play through several very similar races before letting you try anything different). The Enthusia life mode will also feature a history option that records no fewer than 99 years' worth of race results so that you can refresh your memory if you're away from the game for an extended period of time or if you'd just like to reflect on your career as you near the end of it. Enthusia Professional Racing will also include other requisite racing modes, of course, including a free racing option that lets you configure your own solo or two-player split-screen race, and a time attack mode that lets you to compete against ghosts of your previous performances.

The last new feature we noticed today was a postrace report that affords you an at-a-glance appraisal of your last drive. The report basically comprises a map of the circuit that you just raced, and icons scattered all over it represent your achievements and mistakes for each lap. The icons you can expect to see are as follows: full braking, off course, collision with scenery, collision with opponent, overtake by player, overtake by opponent, and another that tells you what your top speed was and where you reached it. We weren't able to spend enough time with Enthusia to comment on how useful this information might prove, but it does seem like it will do a good job of highlighting areas of a circuit where you're repeatedly making the same mistakes.

We left today's Konami event feeling much more positive about Enthusia Professional Racing than we ever have, so we're now very much looking forward to spending some quality time with a more complete version of the game. We'll bring you more information on Enthusia just as soon as we get our hands on a copy.