Street Syndicate Racing
Francisca Noggles
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.
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.
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).
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S.R.S. is an illegal street racing crew founded late December 2023. The crew can be found speeding through the streets of Los Santos, identified by their black and white monochromatic color scheme. S.R.S. over time has become one of the leading crews behind the early push of the racing scene in San Andreas. Mechanics by day, the underground by night, S.R.S. sticks to the shadows to the best of their abilities. Not revealing the person behind the alias is important to the crew as their identities getting out could lead to some serious consequences in their personal lives outside of racing.
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.
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