There was only one racing series I was concerned with back in the day, exclusively appearing on the PlayStation consoles. Other racing titles were always second best. Other consoles weren't worth thinking about.
Metropolis Street Racer came out before Gran Turismo 3. It plonked players into fully three-dimensional cities before Grand Theft Auto III. It's got a damn near photorealistic London to drive through two years earlier than The Getaway - and, criminally if you ask me, The Getaway hasn't made it onto this 1001 list.
I am simply stunned by MSR, and I've not played it for a single second yet. I don't need a hype video for this one, but we're going to get one...
Let's hit the streets.
Fun Times
Stylish cars. Night-time street racing. In-game cinematics featuring humourous personalised number plates... Metropolis Street Racer is hyping me up for something special, or at the very least something unexpected. I knew the Dreamcast could pull off some polished visuals, but I didn't think anything would be giving Gran Turismo 3 a run for its money before GT3 even came out.
But then Redream crashed. I've got a demo for this game, somewhere. I don't know if it's playable, and I don't have a Dreamcast to find out. But I do have Demul, and it was Demul to the rescue once more.
MSR is big on Kudos. It's not enough for you to win races in MSR. It'll help, but it's not cool. It's not stylish. It won't impress anybody unless you've got Kudos. Drift around corners? Kudos. Nail the perfect racing line for quick lap times? Kudos. Crash into other cars? No Kudos, dude. C'mon. Kudos penalty, that. What are you playing at?
Setting up a new single player career, which will take us through twenty-five chapters of challenges and races across three major cities, we're given the all-important choice of our first car. We don't have to buy it, but we do have to race in it well enough to prove we can handle it, or something.
This screen looks a little weird like something isn't in the right place, but it's actually showing off a big feature of MSR. London, San Francisco and Tokyo are recreated here, and their city layouts are chopped up and fenced off into some 260odd different street circuits.
We're starting on a simple little loop, sure, but anyone with a map and a pen can go wild imagining what street circuits you could pull off if the streets of London were deserted for their duration. I'm getting ahead of myself - or wishing for too much. I don't know at this stage.
To set the scene, some short clips of the location are shown off to the tunes of the local (made up but fairly convincing) radio station, complete with DJ, advertising and an awful choice of music. It's like GTAIII, only without a change the station button. If they want you to feel like you're actually in an MG, actually racing around London, listening to the radio, then they're not doing a bad job at all.
Apart from how utterly devoid of life the entire game is, I suppose. No spectators. No life outside of the track. Not a whole lot going on at all and yet look at it. The cars look great. The scenery is ripped straight out of London. The barriers, man! Just look at all the barriers! I can't wait to clip them hurtling around a corner at 60 miles an hour...
Car in garage, and a couple of customisation options chosen for it, I was ready to embark on my street racing career.
The first challenge is to set a hot lap around Pacific Heights. As well as the attention to detail in the locations and the maps, the time your Dreamcast is running will be used to work out the time of day in the various cities you'll drive through, and so San Francisco is about to be woken up by the roar of an MG Something-or-other, screaming through the streets in search of enough Kudos to unlock future challenges.
The handling and actual gameplay feel pretty good. They've got a bit of weight to them, and you'll have to think about when to hit the brakes and when to just coast around the corner in an attempt to set good times.
If you're feeling brave, you can get your handbrake going and swing it around for some extra points come race end...
... but those drifts need a delicate touch, as oversteering is quite the issue for me. Hitting the barriers will give you a penalty to your Kudos score. You'll not see it during a race, but it's counting something in the background, and you'll need to maximise your Kudos in order to unlock the next stages of your career, and with it, cars and tracks.
My penalties here effectively wiped out whatever style I managed to pull off, but I've got some street cred attached to my name now, so we're off to a good start.
Frustrations
After a few more challenges, the only other car I'd seen was my ghost from the best lap, and I'd heard the same song twice on the San Francisco radio station. It must be pretty popular. MSR looks good, but where's the racing?
The timed run challenges put other cars on the track for you to avoid during your run, but they're slow and dawdling and just serve as moving obstacles, not opposition racers. They're such a non-issue that by the time you catch up with one, you've overtaken it and won't see it for the rest of your minute long race.
I get that we're being eased into the racing, first by learning the tracks alone, and then by having cars in the way, but this is perhaps a tad too slow a way to be introduced. We all know what we want to be doing, and we were hyped up by that thumping introduction, but we've not seen anything like that yet.
Weaving through the London traffic, if you could call it that, we earn enough Kudos to see some cars bumble around San Francisco as well. If you squint, you can see one in the distance in one of the screenshots. They really were a case of blink and you'll miss them.
And then I encountered a small roadblock. Not enough Kudos. Evidently, I was still stuck in my Gran Turismo ways, thinking of smooth lines, and hitting the apex. What I should have been concerned about was my style. Flinging cars around corners. Making my tyres squeal. I need to do better if I want to progress.
Huh. Well, this is interesting. You can't just farm Kudos, you need to actually improve over the course of these challenges. Ok. Well, let's see what we can do more stylishly on this attempt.
Oh, c'mon, I'm not having that. Restart and do it better.
Oh. A penalty for abandoning a race. What high stakes are these, eh? Too high for me to care about, that's what.
Final Word
And so my time with Metropolis Street Racer is on hold. Unlocking tracks and cars is a fact of single-player racing game life. Grinding out results and farming credits to afford something is recognisable too. Having your progress potentially scuppered and being penalised for a bad race... that's a bit harsh, isn't it?
I was drawn into a fast, fluid, fantastic looking street racer, but what I'm looking at seems to be a different product. A well-polished product, but not a racer. Not right now, at least.
There is a quick race option that I haven't tried (because I bet it'd just be around the pathetic courses I've unlocked and not the much longer courses that take ten minutes to finish), and there are multiplayer races should you be in the early 2000s with the Internet hooked up to your Dreamcast, but shouldn't the campaign mode kinda push you in that direction a little quicker? I suppose, to argue for the Devil, that Gran Turismo gates you off with license tests, but I do remember racing rather earlier in those games.
Metropolis Street Racer is a massive surprise to me. I don't know how close San Francisco is to real life, but the little bit of London I've seen looks amazing. We must be racing in the 28 Days Later universe, though, on account of how empty it is. It's the one thing that lets it down, I think. We've closed off the city to dick around in cars, and there's absolutely nobody watching, not even blurry looking two-frame sprites.
I do want to play more MSR. I want to hear more authentic (ahem) radio, I want to drive more cars, I want to see more complex circuits, and somewhere out there is Tokyo, which will be nice to have a look at... but if I have to earn all that by getting good, I don't think I'll have enough patience.
It's not that I'm struggling to adapt to its physics or anything - the controls are as good as the graphics - it's just that I'm not driving in the way it wants me to drive, and it never explains how. Skill, Style, Penalty. The penalty one I get; hitting things is bad. But how bad? How much Kudos do I lose for bumping the barrier? Does it scale with speed? Can I get away with two but not the third?
If it was more transparent than 'Wey hey!', then we might be good, but it doesn't seem so, and it leaves me with nothing to say other than "Metropolis Street Racer is an amazing game, but..."
Will that put you off? It shouldn't. MSR really has wowed me with its digital London, but it hasn't yet wowed me with its racing. Here's hoping.
Fun Facts
Metropolis Street Racer, developed by Bizarre Creations, first released in 2000.
Version played: Sega Dreamcast, 2001, via emulation.