Gaming Target - Xbox: The Fast and the Furious

Written by Alex Fitzgerald on August 22, 2003

First Impressions: Based on the original movieЕnot the sequel, The Slow And The Timid.

Whether you want to admit it or not, The Fast And The Furious did leave its mark on entertainment. The movie basically succeeded because director Robert Cohen knew it would fail. He knew that there wasn't a chance in hell that a movie with Vin Diesel and Paul Walker (two of the worst actors making the rounds in Hollywood today) with a plot basically made to attach car chases together would win an Oscar, or get a decent grade from a critic for that matter. So, knowing this, The Fast And The Furious was built to be nothing but good movie going fun, with fast cars and hot women doing their job to bring in testosterone-enraged men, and the likes of J14 pinup Paul Walker and so-many-damn-muscles-you-want-to-hurt-the-guy Vin Diesel did their job to bring the teen girls in.

The Result? A summer smash that brought in 142 million in the box office that has spawned a sequel and now a video game. The Fast And The Furious game, being developed by Genki and published by VU Games, is set to come out for all systems this February, allowing all gamers to explore illegal street racing just like Paul Walker did in the movies.

The way Genki plans to allow players to get this experience is through a game system that resembles Grand Theft Auto more than it does Need For Speed. Instead of flipping through a menu for different race types, like many games have you do, you will instead drive around virtual Los Angeles looking for yellow markers that tell you there's a race you can get into. Like in real life though, if you want to find a race you're going to have more luck finding one during the middle of the night than you are during the day. Don't worry though, each hour on the game's clock is only a minute in our time, so night will fall on you quickly even if you start a game in the early morning hours.

As you do more drag races in the game you will start to earn cash and reputation points. The cash will come in useful for when you want to spruce up your wheels inside a car shop or just flat out buy a new vehicle at one of the game's many virtual licensed dealerships. The reputations points will also become useful, as the more you get of them the more missions you will open up.

At this point in the development cycle The Fast And The Furious is showing graphics that aren't exactly inspiring. Though the game screenshots that have been released display a nice amount of detail on the cars, the recent of the environments don't look nearly as detailed, and everything just looks a little unpolished. Still though, Genki has a lot of time to patch this up before the game's release.