Street Racing Syndicate All Videos
Walda Caesar
Do you dream of rolling out of bed at eleven at night to join the world of illegal street racing in Los Angeles while betting against competitors and having more than a dozen generic girlfriends to start each race? Street Racing Syndicate has all the fun of a solid, easy to play street racing game with a lot of open world frills to keep it interesting. Its a deep game full of customization, unlockables and still everything feels like an earned reward from winning a bet to unlocking cars, girlfriends and videos of them.
For anyone that wants to get to the event rather than drive to it, the game lets you have that option with the map. The sad thing is nothing is on your mini map. You need to hop in the big map and select your next location in a menu and whether you want to jump to it or drive.
The bulk of the game is in crew meets where you race in a series of three different races on three tiers. Each race and tier takes place in the same area, so it modifies the course a bit each time. It makes for thirty-two races in four areas from the start. Before each race of the series, you can select to place a side bet with one of the three competitors. If you beat them, you get the money and if you lose, then it costs you.
A nice touch is being able to see the stats of the vehicles you can bet against. I say just bet the one offering the most money. As they win or lose through betting, their cash will increase or decrease, so it turns into an issue of beating the same person means others will have more money by the final race. Its incentive to bet against others.
To unlock the next tier, you need cars with a minimum horsepower and you need enough respect. This respect is earned by winning races and you can get some bonus respect here and there for slides, near misses, overtaking competition and some air off of a bump. If you knock into anything before your respect is calculated you lose it, but its no big loss since winning races gives far more respect.
Women and racing have always gone together, but wow does Street Racing Syndicate plaster them all over the game, its menus and on its streets. It makes the game different in a laughable, offensive or great way depending on your perspective. The women offer a variety of challenges. Everything from checkpoint rallies and big air competition to chasing them in their own street rides. Once they become your girlfriend they then hang out at the warehouse. Your own harem of women that you select one to roll with who will drop the go signal at each race. For those out there into videos there are provocative videos of the real women these girlfriends are based after. Someone had to chose to put these videos into the game. It goes a step beyond and an extra frill to keep you in game.
Street Racing Syndicate blurs the line for me between an easy to play arcade game and more of a realistic game. Your car takes damage and after enough damage your car starts to drag a little. You can either instantly repair it at any event or you can take a drive to the only garage in the city. These repairs cost money, so try to stay away from obstacles.
Nitrous is a luxury instead of a given, because you need to buy it at the garage. Using the nitro boost is still a challenge, you need to hold it down to see any significant momentum, because when you use it, your opponents will too. Its easy to just forget about it until the top tier races at the crew meets.
On the mid tier races, your competitors are like jackals that hang around you, waiting for the proper moment to overtake you either with a mistake or a wide straightaway. This pushes the pace and depends you to avoid making major mistakes. The intelligence of the others feels top notch. They can avoid my reckless driving and compensate for a lot of different factors. Its very subtle and you need to go to great lengths to reveal it.
With all of these upgrades and even purchasing vehicles, the worst part is the navigation to do so. You look at manufacturers and then you look at the parts. Switching between parts creates a load image so you need to remember which part had what stats. I wish there was just an easy way to see what I needed or even to compare them.
Street Racing Syndicate is an open world multiplatform racing video game produced by Eutechnyx, and released by Namco on August 31, 2004, for the PlayStation 2, GameCube, Xbox and Windows-based personal computers. A separate version of the game was also released for the Game Boy Advance on October 4, 2005. During its release, it was meant to compete against Need for Speed: Underground 2, the sequel to the critically acclaimed first game released in 2003.
The game features an underground import racing scene, on which the player's main objective is to live the life of a street racer, gaining respect and affection of various women in the city. This is featured in a way that the player must win a variety of respect challenges to attract girls and maintain a good victory streak in order to ensure that they remain with the player. Once in their car, the girls will present the next open race that the player enters. As the player continues to win races, dance videos will be unlocked for viewing. Also, another plot in the game's story mode is to earn a customized Nissan Skyline GT-R R34 after winning races.
The game has 50 licensed cars from a variety of manufacturers, including models from Nissan, Toyota, Mitsubishi, Lexus, Subaru, Mazda, and Volkswagen. SRS also features a car damage model that forces the player to drive carefully, heavy damages may impact car performance and heavy repairs may drain the player of money earned from their last race. The Game Boy Advance version does not have licensed car names, lacks police chases and career free roam, and customization is different from other platforms.
It seems to have taken forever to get a release over here in the UK, but that day is finally here...tomorrow. When we first picked up this game from the kind folks at Nintendo we thought one thing; oh dear. Developed by Eutechnyx, passed on via Namco it is now being published in the UK through Nintendo. One thing jerks here, scantily clad woman and Nintendo combined. It just doesn't sit well in the stomach. So, we approached with caution...
There are a number of game modes to get into. Street Mode is the main one, from here you buy your own car, customise it, take part in races and challenges, meet woman and do various other 'hip' things. Then there is Arcade Mode and Multiplayer mode; which are self-explanatory really. When you enter Street Mode you are a total rookie. You 'hook up' with some uber-experienced shaven headed character who stupidly gives you the keys to his super-pimped 'ride' and asks you to win a race for him. You obviously oblige and so long as you hold forwards enough and steer around the corners you should get through that one no problem.
Baldy then gives you a massive amount of money to go and buy and pimp up your own ride, then you're on your own in the big city. After picking one of a number of available (crap and good) cars like the Mitsubishi Evolution VIII, Subaru Impreza S202 and Volkswagen Golf VR6 you get to do some serious pimping. We chose the Subaru as nobody in his or her right mind would want to drive a Golf or a Mitibushi. So, we take our very bog-standard Imperza and try to drive it, hit a corner at over 40mph and you will go skidding all over the place, try to go over 70mph on a long straight and you might be in quite a bit of trouble. We would just be embarrassed to put this into a hard-core street race, so some severe pimping was in order. Off to the garage we went to put on some banging trims and the like.
This has to be one of the best bits of the game. Being able to take your out-the-box auto and REALLY beef it up is very rewarding. You can take an average 'family car' and pump it full of speed, neon lighting and flame stickers, paint it fluorescent pink and go and tear up the streets. You're dunked out on the streets with your car and a whole lot of exploring to do. If you're the sort of person that likes to drive about, being leisurely and finding things then simply hold down the R trigger and steer your way to challenges various, if like us, you're lazy, simply press Z to open up a city map. From here you can 'warp' to various different areas.
Garage, Warehouse and Showroom are the default ones, so you can repair and add parts to your ride, check back at your HQ or buy a new automobile for grand driving pleasures. The main meet of the game is in the Crew Meets. Here you race in various different locales from the streets of Philadelphia, Miami and Los Angeles. Unlike most games of this ilk, there is such a thing as daytime, and every so often you will actually see the sun, so be warned. However, the vast majority of it does take place at night and thus once again we have the problem of neon lighting...
It is a bit of a pet peeve of ours. There is something uncommonly distracting about a gaming world in which everything (and we mean everything) reflects everything else, and every other thing lights up and reflects off the next thing onto the next thing. It makes concentrating on a race at high speed quite confusing at time and could probably give one or two people quite nasty headaches. Rant over. Thankfully, the game looks really quite lovely, the car models all damage fairly nicely, but not so badly as to make them look like crap-sacks. The city location is all very nice and detailed...and shiny, but there can certainly be no complaints here. The game spanks along at a quite awesome speed and with no noticeable slowdown, it is all very impressive.
The races then. As well as the Crew Meets there are Street Races, where you simply drive up and challenge an individual for a cash wager prize, then you have the Roll Up Races, whereby a car drives past you with 'Race Me' floating above it, you turn around and race after it, flash your headlights and race them. Then you have Respect Challenges, and it is here that you will meet the women of SRS. Once you get a little way into the game you will be able to hook-up with a woman, and all you have to do is earn her respect. In order to do this, you drive up to a plastically enhanced wonder-pixel, rev your engine up, flash your exhaust pipe and do something vaguely impressive at her request. There is a vast menagerie of sluts women available in the game, simply go to your Warehouse to select one, view her 'stats', enjoy some strip-tease footage and generally worry about the morality of this game.
c80f0f1006