Street Racing Syndicate Pc Game 33
Evangelino Cousteau
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. 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.
Street Racing Syndicate initially received publishing support from The 3DO Company. While the game was still in development, 3DO declared bankruptcy and auctioned off Street Racing Syndicate along with its other assets. Namco picked up SRS for $1.5 million, compared to the $1.3 million that Ubisoft paid for the Heroes of Might and Magic franchise.[8]
Tokyo Xtreme Racer: The (lack of) music has always been the Achilles heel of this series, and every TXR game only has a single bleak repetitive sample of flavorless electronica that loops endlessly for hours. There might be a slight change of tempo during a boss battle, but never fear, it will soon go back to the classic four hour loop soon before you know it.
Modifying your ride in SRS is a serious pain in the dick as well. The car parts are grouped by manufacturer and not part type, making modifications incredibly irritating when you buy an HKS turbo and ten slots down find a Greddy turbo that has an 80 more horsepower gain. All the text is presented in tiny, unreadable font and every single available part needs at least 20 seconds to load, meaning you are going to be spending a ton of time just sitting there watching a loading swirly while debating the type of steering wheel cover you want to buy.
Car modification in TXR is detailed and deep, with upgrades that become available for purchase as your street racing notoriety grows through victories. There are hundreds of settings for car gearing, suspension, and tuning, giving you endless combinations of parts to set up your car for taking on a particular enemy or environment.
Car physics feel great and responsive in this game. When you finally tune your motor and transmission to hit 160 MPH, it genuinely feels like 160 MPH on a highways full of slow moving traffic and other obstacles. F-R cars can be tricky to handle in TXR, but this ramp up in loss of control can be negated through limited-slip differentials and other upgradable traction controls.
In conclusion, Street Racing Syndicate literally fails on every level when pitted against Tokyo Xtreme Racer, but most spectacularly, it fails at being fun. The shoddy menus, empty car selection and monkey-butthole inspired race courses end up making the every step of the SRS experience feel like nothing more than an irritating chore. I really wish they would reboot TXR for the current generation of consoles, but underground street racing may not have nearly the same cool factor these days, since nobody has ever wanted to drag race a Prius against an Corolla.
While Respect Points are the main currency of the single-player career mode, you will also need actual currency too, to buy a vehicle and upgrade and repair it. The main method of acquiring respect is through Crew Meets, a series of three street races (either laps or point-to-point) against a maximum of three opponents, which involve an entry fee, the option to place bets against fellow racers on the outcome, and a final reward of 3000 points. With the exception of a few off-street events, victory in each race earns only 750 points, with the remaining 250 acquired through various drifts and other manoeuvres along the way. If you crash, you lose points, as well as incurring damage that will remain in subsequent races and impede performance until you finish the series and can get your car to a garage.
Presumably, from a game design perspective, these bits were designed to break up the repetition of the main racing: after the initial wooing, your polygon girlfriend will become real and dance around for you in her clothes; you then need her to accompany you to a couple more successful Crew Meet victories to unlock further videos of her dancing around in her smalls.
Perhaps someone somewhere is undertaking a PhD on the street racing titles of the mid-00s and would have the academic curiosity excuse! (Like someone doing a film studies project on erotic thrillers, I guess).
Driving games--especially the subset of driving games that go after the import tuning and underground street racing scene--are on the rise. Thanks to the success of films like The Fast and the Furious and games like Midnight Club 2 and Need for Speed Underground, this subgenre is now in full swing. The British developer Eutechnyx has developed several racing games over the years, including Test Drive Le Mans and Big Mutha Truckers, and now it has an import driving game to call its own in the form of Street Racing Syndicate. The game tries to deliver an authentic street racing experience, but the racing itself tends to be rather unexciting.
Street Racing Syndicate breaks down into a few different modes. Arcade mode lets you choose a car, a race type, and an area so that you can get right down to business. The multiplayer mode lets you race on a split-screen, and it functions pretty well. But the game's depth is found in street mode, which starts out with some inkling of a story but quickly boils down to a fairly standard career mode. Here you'll buy cars, you'll buy parts for your cars, and you'll engage in a variety of races for cash, respect points, girlfriends, or some combination of the three.
When you enter a race, you can also make side bets with the other racers in an attempt to make more money. Money is probably the most important element in SRS, because you'll need it as an ante to enter races. You'll also need it to pay for repairs for your car between races. This makes driving cleanly pretty important, since it's definitely possible to squander most of your race winnings on repairs if you smash into walls and other cars a lot during a series.
The girlfriends aspect of the game is about as shallow as it could possibly be. As you work through your racing career, you unlock respect challenges. Each one is a specific task that is attached to one of the 18 girls in the game. You'll do things like complete checkpoint races, catch air for a long period of time, or follow a car closely without passing or hitting it. If you complete the challenge, you unlock that girl. You'll have to race well to keep girls interested, but bear in mind that you can also steal girls from other drivers by winning races. You can then head off to the warehouse to change girls at any time. The girl you're currently "hooked up" with serves as the flag girl when you race, and she can be lost if you drive poorly, but if you drive well, you can unlock hilariously awful videos featuring these real-life import models.
There are 50 licensed cars in Street Racing Syndicate that come from manufacturers like Nissan, Toyota, Mitsubishi, Lexus, Subaru, and Volkswagen. The lack of the Honda brand sticks out like a sore thumb, especially given the fact that cars like the Civic have, for many, become synonymous with the import racing scene. Still, there is a decent variety of vehicles, and each one handles fairly differently.
You can even further alter the way the cars handle by tricking them out. In street mode, you have access to a lot of different customization options, from weight reduction to exhaust systems. The game uses real brands and lets you run your car on a Dyno to get a look at how it's performing in its current condition. Unfortunately, the impact of a part on your car's horsepower, acceleration, top speed, or other statistics isn't shown as plainly as it should be. If you aren't paying close attention when moving from part to part, you'll miss the numbers as they change. A simple "+2" or "-0.4 seconds" that shows exactly what each part does would have been a huge help here.
Once you get through all of the different modes and options that surround today's driving games, the core of them is all that remains. How well do the cars handle? Does a specific car deliver a good sense of speed? Are the other racers intelligent? These sorts of gameplay questions can make or break a racing game. SRS, to its credit, does a nice job of differentiating its cars from one another. The cars also handle well, approaching simulation in some ways but still focusing more on exaggerated sliding physics than on purely realistic approaches. The cars take damage, but the crashes in the game are unrealistic and extremely dissatisfying. The impacts look soft and weak, and the damage done to the car models doesn't move too far beyond a cracked windshield and a loose hatchback. The physics behind the crash are also subpar. Even a head-on collision just results in a slow spinout that, more often than not, merely gives the other three cars plenty of time to pass you. On top of that, you can often avoid the spin by hitting your nitrous button as you collide, thus letting you power right through the crash with only a drop in speed to hinder you.
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