I’ve been playing the absolute shit out of Genki Racing Project’s Tokyo Xtreme Racer revival. Part of the stranglehold it has on my free time right now comes down to the fact that it is a beautiful anachronism, preserved almost exactly as it was when it last appeared on PS2 in this form more than 20 years ago.
Sure, it’s been updated (barely) to at least feel modern in terms of UI resolution and visuals (it supports HDR kinda!), but what’s presented here is, effectively, exactly what anyone who was glued to those highway battles three whole console generations ago remembers it all looking, sounding and – most crucially – playing like.
In every possible sense, it’s like time just never progressed after the series sort of faded into the ether. The gameplay, designed around simply putting enough distance on a rival street racer that you rolled up behind and flashed your high beams at, still boils down to just a pair of life bars at the top of the screen. Go kicky fast okay, deplete their life bar before yours by leading them with enough distance, pocket XP and upgrade your car, repeat.
Addiction with a Side of Ground Effects
It is, just as it was in the heady early days of the post-dotcom-bubble 2000s, a “CarRPG.” You circle Tokyo’s extensive, circuitous highway system, hunting for cars to race, pocket the spoils and use them to upgrade your car. A late-in-life advancement of the series’ popularity (such as it was) added real cars instead of convenient look-alikes, which means you throw the actual Skyline around those corners at stupid speeds to carom off the walls in bumper car fashion.
All of that is still here, doled out in a slightly confusing and charmingly antiquated menu system that offers some fairly decent tuning options, bios of all the 500+ (!!) racers you’re up against, upgrade trees and, of course, tons of customization of your vehicles aero, wraps and decals. I never subscribed to car customization even at the 2Fast and/or 2Furious street racing cultural zenith, but those options are still here, if you want ’em.
The game otherwise plays more or less like it always has. That core loop of heading out to find and flash opponents has a few added wrinkles like sequential races where your life bar – depleted though it may have become – is preserved between races, and you’ll even battle multiple opponents at the same time, but the name of the game here is the same as it’s always been, with a tight little hamster wheel of upgrades, new opponents (after you take out all the other racers in a crew, their boss shows up and flashes you) and more upgrades.
Digression
I should rewind a bit for some backstory. This series holds a special place in my heart not just because of its temporal Goldilocks zone of my lifetime, where I was in my early 20s in the Bay Area and awash in video game writing freelance work, but because it began my life in San Francisco right on the cusp of the millennium.
See, mere months before Y2K hit, I left a rowdy University of Washington house in Seattle where I was running my PS2-focused web site to take a job in gaming PR at a boutique firm in SF. It was short-lived, and the clients were a laundry list of now-defunct video game publishers, but one of them was a scrappy little outfit called Crave that had a racing game getting prepped for the launch of the upcoming Dreamcast.
To the credit of that PR firm’s leadership, we were encouraged to play and know our games deeply, which meant I had justifiable reason to really dig into this racer well before it actually hit stores, and I can still remember sweating like crazy in that back room without AC (the whole office sat on top of a copy shop, too, so churning printing machines were constantly slowly baking us from below), desperate to just beat one more rival before I had to head back to my desk to do actual work.
It’s a deeply indelible image for me of my first few months in San Francisco, and represented a massive shift from the old days of reviewing games to now pitching them to people. Amid literally dozens of other shipping games and a sea of peripherals we were hawking, this one game stood out as not just an easy sell, but one that was incredibly addictive.
Earnest Evocation
One of the reasons why I think I’m so enamored of this TXR reboot is just that it’s presented without any attempt to mine nostalgia; the game is playable nostalgia in that it really hasn’t changed since it was last on a PlayStation system, but none of the current cynical cash-ins or too-obvious winking we-remember-this-too nods are present here. This is a game made by people that loved the series as much as I did, bringing it back for what feels like an audience of one.
Don’t get me wrong; the visuals here are updated, but only inasmuch as they now resemble how your mind’s eye remembers the prior games looking. “Workmanlike” is the most flattering way to describe a bunch of nighttime freeways and cheesy Temu Wangan Trance that gels with a solid framerate and controls that do genuinely let you feel some of the upgrades. Even the differences in weight distribution of, say, a mid-engine car vs. a FF or rear-wheel one are palpable in a way I don’t remember the older games having.
The modernization extends to the game’s AI which was, generously, rather simple back in the day. Now, they’re more aggressive, can actually use things like PIT maneuvers and blocking, will happily ride walls like you can to avoid braking and generally just feel like they have some actual personality. Some racers are wily, some are psychos, some are timid and avoidant and it’s arguably the area where the game feels like it got the most attention – which is precisely how it should be. This is a series that had dialed in its gameplay loop from the start, and it really didn’t need to futz with the core.
By modernizing things on a shoestring budget (this began life as an Early Access PC release, and the news that it was actually getting a PS5 port after being relegated to JP-only PC and mobile releases was met with the happiest of happy dances in ol’ Bishop Manor, I tell you whut), there was no room for anything but the original skeleton of what made this series great.
There’s no pomp, no flash, but what’s here feels tight and honed and refined and thawed straight from the start of the 21st century – there’s a racer named BARGAIN.COM for Chrissakes. If there’s some kind of butchering analogy here, it’s probably a really great piece of meat that’s been perhaps over-trimmed and presented with zero pretension, but that first bite tells you everything you need to know about how good it’s going to be, and well after you’re full, you’re still dipping back in for more bites.
With all that’s happening in the world right now, it feels like a genuine miracle that something this untouched by all that has taken place in the two decades since the last game in this series that I played, and while I’m no longer that dropout transplant from Seattle sweating on a beanbag chair in the back of a jungle-painted back room while my boss yells for me to get back to work, I can still feel like one as I careen around a digitized approximation Tokyo’s freeway system at 2AM.