Retro throwback - Metropolis Street Racer (Version Tested: Sega Dreamcast in VGA Mode)

 

Back in the year 2000 this game went hand in hand with Coldplay's first album "Parachutes" because I had a habit of listening to the album while playing this belter. But on revisiting Metropolis Street Racer on the Dreamcast I realised just what a sad loss Bizarre Creations are, and how brilliant the core game mechanic of MSR (and latter games Project Gotham Racing, 2, 3 and 4 were on the Xbox / Xbox 360). 

Going back to the game recently, I realised that in the interim 24 years, I've got REALLY rubbish at games because I found MSR tough from the get go. Starting out with no gamesaves (due to the death of a VMU) I had to start from scratch and realised what a piece of genius it is to allow the player just a slimmed down garage to start with (3 slots, and a bit of a crap selection of roadsters initially), forcing you to refine the game's delicious balance of flat-out speed vs stylish drift cornering. 

You start out with a pretty small selection of tracks to race around on, including iconic London, Tokyo and San Franciso locations (as I've said elsewhere, why the heck San Francisco doesn't feature in more racing games I'll never know). 

With the clunky-assed DC controller I started to get a feel for how the cars grip and slide, and began to work my way up the Kudos levels. Kudos is the game's way of measuring progress and to proceed to the next set of stages, you've got to drive stylishly as well as fast, and you'll find you have to retry races to max out the amount of Kudos you win. You can also gamble against successful races, seeing if you can shave a few seconds off your time or overtake a few more cars to boost your experience score. This is quite unlike the way most driving / racing games work, offering instead monetary rewards to just purchase a more powerful car with. MSR makes you LEARN how to drive to the game's maximum potential, and that's one of the reasons why I played it so much back in the day, and found it horribly addictive even today. 

It doesn't look super-great compared to modern racers obviously, but it's not ugly either, and you get a fairly smooth frame rate from the thing given the kit it's running on. As you work your way up through each experience level you'll be given the chance to trade in your old 'clunkers' you initially bought for something new, sleek and amazing - all after completing a challenge race of course - and boy are those challenge races, well, challenging. 

The more I replayed the game the more I realised just how sanitized and boring modern arcade racers are (let alone the snoozefest of track racing stuff like Forza Motorsport or Gran Turismo). Bizarre Creations really knew how to make a game fun, challenging and horribly addictive and I remember buying MSR, PGR1, PGR2, PGR3, PGR4 and Blur before someone cruelly dissolved that team (Activision, IIRC). So many great arcade racer developers have gone to the wall (Bizarre Creations, Evolution Studios, Angel Studios Black Rock Studios and Codemasters just aren't the team they once were either). For me, MSR represents one of the finest racing games of all time, and certainly one of the best Dreamcast games of all time too. If you can't track down the kit to play it on, do yourself a favour and pick up a Steam Deck and get yourselves emulated-up for this as it allegedly works rather well on Valve's portable retro-friendly console too.