Street Racing Syndicate is Namco's latest attempt to bring the life of hardcore street racers into the living room.
If only real pavements were that shiny...
Street Racing Syndicate is Namco's latest attempt to bring the life of hardcore street racers into the living rooms of thugs, homies, and suburban kids alike. Seeing as I more than likely fall into the latter group, I must admit that this game was a strange and foreign experience to me, but one I felt I could appreciate after learning more about it. So how did my experience in trying something new and fresh turn out? Let's look:
And so the game begins. It begins, appropriately enough, with some kind of gangster-looking homie talking to another one of his homies on his yo-yo cell, or whatever. Apparently, whoever was going to race in his super-fast car in this week's race was arrested for drugs or racing or something, so now it's up to you, some random guy, to race the super-fast car and take half of the winnings for your troubles. This is the game's way of presenting you with a tutorial, as well as a bit o' bling-bling (that's street for "money") to start off with. Ready? Let's go, then.
The controls for the game seem awkward at first, especially for those of us not used to "realistic" driving games. Since I am one of those people, I tried to be understanding as far as the controls were concerned. This wasn't Mario Kart or F-Zero, so I had to expect a little bit more difficulty in the steering department than I did from those games. After thoroughly introducing my car's hood to the side of many, many buildings, I began to get the hang of the game's controls, and even decided that the manner in which they were set up worked very well, meaning that I will refrain from complaining about the lack of an option to customize the controls in any way we pleased. In short, the controls take a little getting used to, but once you get the hang of things, you shouldn't have much difficulty with them.
Damage to your car is something I need to take issue with, however. Yes, your car can become damaged. Damage, in turn, will take its toll in lowered overall performance from your vehicle. The only real problem here is that your car is for the most part, cosmetically invincible, meaning that aside from taking it into the garage to get fixed, there's really no possible way to find out exactly how beat-up your car is unless you know the complicated math formula behind how fast your car is as compared to how fast it is currently going. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem like the kind of game that Steven Hawkings would play, so odds are the only real gauge you will have for this matter will be your own powers of deduction. Of course, one easy way to figure things out is that while it is disturbingly easy for your car to quickly reach 50% damage, it seems nigh-impossible to get it too far past that point. This is either an issue of poor programming or convenience- it's your call.
Anyways, with the tutorial race out of your way, you move on to the meat of the game. This begins with purchasing and subsequently tricking out your wheels. Not sure what either "tricking out my wheels" or "pimping my ride" meant, I later discovered that this meant attaching enough propulsion equipment to your vehicle to put it through a wall in first gear. And as if it merited me actually saying it, the further you advance throughout the game, the more crap you'll be able to stick on your car, and the more expensive, cooler cars you'll be able to unlock and then purchase (stealing cars is the one street element sadly absent in this game). Speaking as someone who knows squat about cars, I must say that this was exceedingly difficult for me, given that not only did I fail to recognize a single model of car available for purchase (meaning that Ford, Chevy, and Dodge all fail to appear in the game), but I also had no idea what in tarnation I was doing when I was tricking my ride. The garage interface seemed more concerned with letting you know the brand name of whatever you're buying than avoiding confusion. When sticking things on my car, I was consistently confused as to whether or not I actually needed it, or if it was replacing something I already bought. This can be very frustrating for those of you who, like me, have no bloody idea what a "racing plate" is. I ultimately ended up buying anything that looked pretty and affordable and hoped for the best. On a positive note, however, the garage also offers free cosmetic upgrades to your car, such as paint jobs, flame decals, and the like. It also, for people who know nothing about that sort of thing, offers a small variety of preset custom paint jobs, which is a nice touch (though I could have stood for a few more presets than the few existing ones).
Once you're out on your own, the basic gameplay concept is pretty simple. You drive around the city looking for ways to increase your cashflow, respect, and your libido. Needless to say, the way to do all three of these things is the exact same: by racing against other people in (or out of) officially-sanctioned races, or by otherwise performing some feat of skill and speed behind the wheel (such as racing through checkpoints located throughout the city). To provide you with some semblance of direction, of course, your boss homie dude keeps ringing you on your cell to suggest things that he thinks you should be doing. While you're given the option of just jumping directly to wherever the game directs you to next, you are also allowed to drive around the city and look around for yourself for something to do. While this creates a large sense of open-endednes to the game, there are also a few problems inherent in this system, as well.
" If you're going to have fun with this game, it's probably going to have to be done on the race track."
While you are free to drive around and explore the city, it would have been nicer if there was a bit more to do. Perhaps I'm just a bit spoiled on Vice City, but the city just doesn't feel as interactive as it could be. Aside from looking around for one of a few different available races/challenges to compete in, the only real other things to do while driving around in the city is either head to the garage or the showroom, find someone on the road to race, or get into trouble with the cops (which is pretty easy to do, because cops in this game actually get mad when they see you shattering the speed limit). That being said, the cops in this game couldn't possibly be any dumber if they tried, since evading is disturbingly easy even when you're about five feet away from them. And the fine you are assessed when (if) they catch you is dependent on how much money you have at the time. Which means that you can feel free ram into about five or six cop cars head-on, lead them on a cross-city chase, and end up with about a fifty-dollar fine (or even more hilariously, a warning). Such service!
Anyways, the main racing events pit you up against three other guys in a total of three races on the streets of LA for a large cash prize. To increase your winnings, you also have the options of making side bets with your fellow suckers, ah, racers for varying amounts of cash. They're stupid enough to bet you no matter how much you outclass them, but at least smart enough to lower the amount of cash they bet for with each succeeding time you win. Aside from the main events, there are other racing challenges in the game which include short point-to-point sprints, checkpoint time trials, and of course racing against some random schmuck you see in the middle of the street.
Girlfriends are another interesting aspect of gameplay. Up until a certain point, my unidentified and half-dressed homie had been calling me on my cell from time to time, directing me to various venues at which I could procure some cash and wreck the hell out of my car whilst doing it. However, the purpose of one particular call was because my friend was apparently concerned that I wasn't getting enough girlie action. He promptly aimed to remedy this by sending me out to impress the ditziest imbecile in the entire city by driving really fast around the block for a couple of minutes. This apparently was enough to convince her that I was a dangerous guy, and she asked me in the manner of a pre-pubescent girl if me and her could hook up sometime. Of course, if you still hear her past your own raucous laughter by this point, then you must be Al Gore.
SRS contains 18 different girlfriends (though at the rate this game is going, "ho's" would be a far more appropriate term) for you to get your hands on, none of them posing much more intelligence than a below-average soap dish. On top of being complete idiots, however, your bimbos are also quite fickle, and tend to leave you for dumb things like losing lots of races. In worse cases, your girls will actually leave you for your rival. At least in a game like Vice City, you could have them killed after something like this happens, but then again, it's not like it was much of a loss in the first place. The true "benefit" of the girlfriend system is a set of unlockable videos that you can go back to your warehouse and watch whenever you please. The videos, sadly, do little for the game except add an unpleasant "BMX XXX"-ish quality to the game. If you're going to have fun with this game, it's probably going to have to be done on the race track.
The course markers aren't exactly subtle.
I have very mixed feelings about the graphics in this game. On one hand, it's very obvious that whoever was responsible for them knew what they were doing. Someone honestly had to tell me that my main boss friend homie brother dude was a computer-generated model, and not a real human actor transposed into video game form (a 'la the 1st Mortal Kombat). And any part of the city during the daytime looks very pretty, and almost Vice City-esque. That being said, there are a few more questionable decisions made graphically that again bring the game's score down a bit.
First off, I should mention that the time of day has absolutely nothing to do with what time it actually is. Rather, it is a result of what part of the city you're in. Ergo, downtown L.A. is doomed to forever live in darkness, whereas the sun never sets on the valley. The reasoning behind this we may never know, but I suspect it's so that the graphics people only had to draw up one model of any particular part of the city. And, needless to say, the majority of the city was drawn at nighttime, which is a bit of a shame since, as I stated above, the daytime graphics are superior to the non-daytime ones. The city doesn't really look that bad at night, but the visibility can be hell sometimes. The streets at night look almost... wet, like it's been raining or something (which is the main source of the aforementioned visibility problems). And if you pay enough attention to the street lights, they're sprites, not 3D models. For those of you who don't speak geek, this means that they look really weird and unrealistic up-close.
For the most part, my graphical complaints are really just nerdish nitpicking, and overall really don't mar the game that much. However, the one issue that does become a problem is the poorly-drawn garage interface, which makes going there more of a chore on the eyes than the wallet. More contrast between the on-screen text and the background on which is presented would have been nice, as would have been other changes to the garage interface which I'll talk about more in the gameplay section. I give SRS a 10/10 in the potential department, and 8/10 for what we actually ended up with, so that comes out to about 9/10 overall for graphics. Let's move on.
Sound was an extremely difficult rating to give for the mere reason that I absolutely hate rap music in all of its forms. I was forced to call in friends who actually listened to stuff to assist me in determining whether the game's particular selection of licensed tracks were any good. They fit the mood of the game, at the very least, but even in that case I would have very much appreciated the ability to change tracks (or perhaps change to a completely different genre, but that's asking a bit much, methinks). I finally settled with turning the music off entirely.
Moving on to non-music-related issues, the sound of this game is pretty much what you'd expect from a game like this. Squealing tires, realistic garage sounds, and characters who talk to you in street. I could tell they were talking street because I had absolutely no idea what in tarnation they were saying. After listening to these people for awhile, I began to get the feeling that perhaps I was honestly in the middle of a street race for my life and my wallet. So the scripting isn't half-bad, so long as us rich suburban kids have a "Gangsta to English" dictionary handy while we play.
In summary, the sound works very well for the game, despite my personal opinions of rap music. A perfect score goes down a notch or two, however, for the lack of an ability to skip past the really obnoxious tracks (that brotha ain't got no flow!). Well, that and it would have been nicer if any of the girls in the game had a brain in their empty little heads.
Anyways, that's just about the entire game. Despite what the back of the box may lead you to believe, you never do leave L.A., so your races here are pretty much most of what the game has to offer unless you're so much in need of a cheap laugh that you actually feel like watching all of the videos (in which case, you might as well just go play BMX XXX). The game will get old and wear thin about as fast as the racing does, so you can pretty much gauge the game's lifespan based on that rule of thumb.