billservo's Full Review: SuperCar Street Challenge for PlayStation 2
In a world where every console racer produced is going to be held up to the Gran Turismo watermark, you'd have a hard time introducing anything worth a second look to most gamers. Today's racer has to have realistic physics without sacrificing gameplay, photo-realistic graphics without sacrificing frame rate, a huge variety of tracks and an even greater variety of licensed cars.
Developer Exakt entertainment seems to have realized this and tried to incorporate a little of all of these features. But a little is certainly not enough anymore, causing Supercar Street Challenge (SSC) to fall far too short of the high standards a racer has to measure up to.
Even though it's outshined by GT3 SSC is by no means an outright failure. In fact, a year ago SSC would have made a worthy launch title. It has some visually impressive backdrops, a reasonable collection of licensed vehicles, and more than enough track selection to keep players interested.
These are all good features, but the quality of a racer lies in its physics engine. This is where SSC fails. Racers can usually be divided into two camps: the GT3 camp and the Ridge Racer camp (but even the RR series is straying these days). In the GT3 camp you have your realistic racers. Almost all aspects of car handling is modeled in these games from 4 wheel drive to 2 wheel drive (front and rear), suspension, shifting the car's weight onto the drive tires, etc. The Ridge Racer camp includes more arcade style racers where physics take a back seat to unrealistic power slides, usually called drift. SSC never really commits to either of these styles, easing up on drift, but not including enough realism to be predictable.
Corners are almost never taken with any loss of grip on the road, which causes the car to oversteer just about every turn. Usually, this is a bad thing since you'll end up hitting a wall, but in SSC hitting a wall rarely affects your speed enough to cost you a race. In fact, many races are more easily won if you know which walls to bounce off of and which once to slow down enough to avoid. Whenever the car does lose traction though, simply slowing down always gets you out of trouble. This approach means that a lot of courses end up running slowly since the engine just isn't suited to powering a car through turns.
Physics problems are not confined to the cars alone. Within the courses themselves SSC has a hard time making up how different collisions should be handled. SSC allows you to drive through a light post. There is about a 5 mph drop in speed, hardly enough of a penalty. You can even drive over curbs, head-on. A slight rumble in the controller is just about the only indication of what you've done. At the same time, pieces of the course are blocked off by chain ropes! Hit one of these and you come to a dead stop with a less than convincing sound effect. Other course barriers have similar effects and a head-on collision isn't required to stop you dead in your tracks. Even rounded pillars don't have you deflecting off, indicating that their roundness is only a graphical enhancement and you may as well have hit a rectangular pillar.
Other questionable reactions include the occasional bounce backwards. Granted, this does make sense for some collisions, but the fact that the collision actually puts my car in reverse does not. Something you don't see often in a console racer is the ability to flip your car. I was actually glad to see that it's possible, but the execution here is horrible as your car almost floats onto its hood.
Not surprisingly vehicle statistics have vague effects on cars. SSC only keeps track of top speed, braking power, handling, and acceleration. Even worse is that these statistics only apply to custom-built cars. The game's stock selection never offers up these stats so it's hard to compare your available choices. The one unique thing SSC offers is the ability to custom build a car. You can choose from several front-end styles, back-end styles, tires, spoilers, headlights, and even mirrors. Again, a half-hearted effort was made since none of these choices affect the car's performance, even down to the tire, which is only a cosmetic effect.
Tires are the least of the car models' problems, though. None of the cars look realistic up close. From a distance they look great, but when zoomed in the textures are bland save for a little faked out reflection mapping.
Courses are a different story, though. Where driving SSC's cars is an exercise in frustration, watching is enjoyable. Backdrops are gorgeous, with real cities convincingly modeled save the occasional anti-aliasing nightmares. SSC doesn't compare in the texture arena (just look at the street in GT3), but that may be because its courses are busy. Most venues are crowded with buildings giving a sense of depth missing from a lot of racers. Light effects coming from these cities are superb, too. The sun coming up behind buildings in the LA courses throws rays of light from the sides of the building blinding you. Rain effects on other levels are almost as impressive especially as rain comes in at different angles splashing down on the ground.
What makes SSC's tracks fun to drive are the shortcuts peppered throughout. Alternate tracks are seen throughout a course, some reachable, some not. Since all the courses have you racing through city streets a lot of shortcuts consist of taking a different turn through a parking lot, a park, or hitting certain freeway exits. Again, since some parts of a course are blocked off it can be a little hit and miss to find the right shortcut, but it does make the track worth playing just a little longer.
For those who actually do care to win races additional course parts are the reward. The game starts out with 4 cities available. As races are won more cities are unlocked or parts of unlocked cities are made accessible. Cars and parts can also be unlocked, but with only 9 cars and 7 cities total it doesn’t take much to find all the game has to offer. In just a couple hours players should be able to complete all the races in the Championship mode. For the bulk of the game driver AI is far too easy. Cars here also suffer from the same problem GT3 had: all cars follow the same race line. Computer controlled cars don’t drive to win, though. AI cars take every turn by slamming on the brakes before the turn and grip through it nicely. Players who blitz these turns will always catch up to the AI cars and pass even if they end up bouncing off the walls. Jumping from 6th to 1st place in a turn is not uncommon. The difficulty level does ramp up quickly, though, and the level of control needed to compete at higher levels just isn’t there so drivers who skate by the lower level races by bumping will have their work cut out for them in the end.
Additional modes include Quick Race, Time Trial, and Versus. For some reason the engine behaves a little differently in Quick Race and Versus modes. There is almost no drift at all requiring even slower driving. You can’t unlock anything in either of these modes so there’s really no incentive to play them. Versus mode is plagued by horrible frame rate problems making it thoroughly unplayable.
In the end SSC just doesn’t end up fitting in correctly. If I play the game thinking it’s supposed to be an arcade racer the game actually feels a little better- perhaps that’s the route Exakt should have gone. The game’s shortcuts and unintentional lose physics evoke that quick fix arcade racing thrill, with enough graphics to back it up. But in the end, SSC is a racing sim, and as one it doesn’t give us any reason to put away our copies of GT3.
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