Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3

TXR 3 is essentially based on the same formula as its predecessors, but there are a few welcome additions that add to the appeal of the game. First off, for the first time in the series, you can race as real vehicles, from all sorts of manufacturers around the world, with the lone exception being Honda (due to their dislike of the Сengine swap' customization). Instead of reasonable copies of real cars, TXR 3 gives you the real deal to race up and down the highways of Tokyo. Speaking of highways, there's more than just Tokyo this time, as TXR also includes areas from Nagoya, and Osaka, Japan, to race around on. Other than that, Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3 maintains all the usual hijinx that it's known for.

While there's free runs and time attacks to amuse you as well, the main game is the Quest, where you attempt to defeat every single challenger on the roads and become the best street racer ever. This means going through well over 300 different challengers, and toppling all 3 areas of Japan along the way, beating entire teams, as well as bosses and the infamous Wanderers. Along the way, you can buy new cars, as well as upgrade them to be more powerful, and more fleet of wheels when you get into the harder races. You can also do some minor customization of the car itself, changing bumpers, side skirts, spoilers, etc. only in this case, it actually has a major affect on the car's performance, and not just a tacked on pretty thing with no substance.

For those not in the know, Tokyo _Xtreme Racer 3 plays out like this. Once you choose a car and the section of highway you want to race on (with different rivals, but you can still cross over if you've unlocked that section by acquiring miles with a car), and the race begins. Sort of. You actually are thrown, free ride style, onto the highway, and it's your call to drive around and find rivals. Think of random battles in RPG's, only this time you're the fiends attacking the Gullwings every 3 steps rather than the other way around. Once you get behind them, you can flash your brights at them, and the race will begin. When it does begin, the idea is to wear down their SP meter, as you might in a typical fighting game (which is why this game is called an RPG/Fighting/Racing hybrid). Only in this case, it wears down depending on how far you can get away from your rival - or how far they get away from you. Other factors can play a part, such as smacking innocent traffic or hitting walls, but the idea is to pull away and wear down the SP meter that way. Once it's depleted, the race is over and you earn effectively cash rewards to upgrade or buy cars. Beat all the rivals of a particular team, and the leader comes out, and you must face them. This is pretty much the entire process, with no standard races, just pure one-on-one encounters with a few exceptions to that rule. There's nothing about TXR 3 that wasn't in past games, so you know exactly what you're getting - highway racing with hundreds of rivals out to make sure you don't climb to the top of the ranks.

It's that one, centralized way to play which makes TXR 3 a love it or hate it kind of experience. Either you will dig the idea of hunting for rivals on a highway and climbing to the top of the street racing world, or you will find the process of few minute races mixed with a glorified free run boring. There's very little middle ground, and it won't take long before you figure it out either way. The fact that no other game has attempted this sort of racing style demonstrates the truly niche market the Tokyo Xtreme Racer series is best known for, and that Сs no truer when you play it for the first time - you'll either like it or loathe it.

If you do get hooked on the concept, TXR becomes an addictive, blood-pumping experience. While the races may only take a few minutes at most, they're intense, with not only opponents to deal with, but traffic and weird turns on the highway that can blow the race. The varying AI of the rivals is admirable as well (and much improved from the awful AI in TXR Zero) - some are pushovers that you can smoke without much effort, others will sandbag and wait until you think you've got it won, then turn on the jets and blow you away, while others will keep pace and make it a close battle down to whoever makes the next big driving error. As you progress, the drivers get more aggressive and more skilled, leaving it up to your own skills to win, as well as making sure your car is properly tuned and powerful enough to handle the tougher competition. But each team has weaknesses (such as the Twister team that seems to have trouble making tight corners and spin out quite often), and you must find and exploit them if you're looking to win. As much as the game can seem to lack depth at first, the level of quality in opponents is quite strong and reveals the true nature of the game.

It's not all perfect though; the highways, while nice and even complete with some rainy weather effects, are repetitive strips of road that aren't totally exciting, and much of the highway is boring stretches with little action unless you make a ridiculous error. While the addition of 2 new cities to race in is nice, the same concept of familiar stretches of highway and uninteresting environments is unfortunate - there's only so much you can do in a game that takes place totally at night, and when you're basing the game on real highway, but after a while racing on the same stretch of road for the 10^th time looking for more rivals is a bit tiresome after a while. Also, the traffic in the game boils down to one kind of car, a bus shuttle that you see a million times. Other than the rivals driving around, this is all you see - there's not a single pedestrian car around otherwise. These though, are visual flaws that stem from the simple fact that this engine is based on a 5-year-old Dreamcast game - and loosely based on a very old PlayStation game called Tokyo Highway Battle.