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    When reviewers get lazy, the gamers have to take up the slack

    posted @ 11/12/2007 04:32:00 PM by Alex J. Avriette
    On a recent trip to Best Buy (for The Orange Box), we picked up Tokyo Drift 2 in the $10 box. Apparently they haven't been able to sell it. It's not surprising given the linked review.


    I'm particularly curious about the disparity between the editors' review and the review of the gamers. At the time of writing, they were 5.2 and 8.3, respectively — a healthy sixty percent difference. What's immediately clear is that the editors don't really have a clue what's going on. First, they say that the cars are hard to handle, but they don't phrase it that way, as such. Rather, the cars don't handle well. They also talk about a story being "nonsensical," when anyone who has familiarity with Initial D and/or haraschiya and zero-yon will tell you that it makes perfect sense.

    They tell you to start with an FF (that's front-wheel-drive, front-engined). And they even offer you these cute little Daihatsu trucks and everything to do this with your initially very limited purse.

    So, like anyone who learns to drive fast, you learn to drive slow first. You get to carve up mountain lines through cherry blossoms in the spring. You get to do it in the winter. You can do it in the rain. And all this teaches you how the car moves. You get a feel for the controls, which are admittedly very different from, say, Need For Speed or Project Gotham Racing, but neither of those titles quite deals with vehicle dynamics like Tokyo Drift does.

    Witness: You can buy different brakes for the car, different tires, and different suspension. So if you want to stiffen up the rear end of your FF car, and put sloppy tires on it, it will hang its tail around turns like the meanest of FR (front-engine, rear-drive; think Corvette) vehicles. Of course, you have to be real careful when you do this, and every time you buy or sell parts, you lose a little money, so you gotta learn what you put on the car. This is what makes the little Daihatsu competitive on these tracks, just like the legendary Initial-D Hachi-Roku.

    They then tell you to progress to an AWD car (such as the Subaru STI or Mitsubishi Evo) because, no matter what those people tell you about the cars being bad-ass, an AWD car is easy enough to drive. This also introduces you to more power, and power-sliding, as you can use the power-over (or throttle-steer) to bring the tail around, and not have to rely on suspension tricks.

    Again, this is missing from the PGR/NFS franchises, and every other American car game I've played (and I mean all the way back to Spy Hunter on the 8 bit Nintendo, kiddos). It's absolutely crucial for understanding how to drive in a drift, or really, how to handle any car that's ass-over nose or vice-versa. You get the STI or the Evo in PGR and NFS, and you just go faster. They "handle" better, which means they respond better to the stick and they stick to the road better, but the dynamics of the cars don't change much at all.

    In NFS:Carbon, we had the "drift" segues, and that was simply a matter of timing arrows on a course. And even then, your only technique was the power-over (and possibly also the feint).

    So while the AWD cars are a little more fun because they can scoot a little faster, you still have to build up your skill, and this is where the reviewers for the magazines probably got pretty bored.

    From AWD there's really only one place to go, and that's rear-wheel drive. There are basically three configurations of RWD vehicles, the MR (mid-engine, rear-drive, like an MR2 or some Ferraris), the FR, as previously mentioned, and the RR (rear-engine, rear-drive, like a Porsche; Automobile magazine once proclaimed the Porsche 911 to be the "king of oversteer," where oversteer is just a polite word for ass-over-nose, or, more currently, "drifting."). There are plenty to choose from, and we have your average Supra and so on. I don't really need to go into detail here, because we can mostly just repeat the section above about AWD.

    Going faster does not mean you drift better. Having more horsepower does not make your car drift better. It's entirely about the dynamics of the vehicle while on the course. Tokyo Drift 2 forces you to focus on the course, the car, and even the car's components and more importantly what they do before you can get very far. This means there's a steep learning curve. For those willing to pay that price of admission, it's a very rewarding game.

    There is one downside to the game, and that is the graphics are a little on the poor side. While it is a PS2 game, it looks almost like a ported PSX game, or even something from a Super Nintendo. It's pretty not-so-great. However, I am definitely willing to give it a huge amount of credit for the locations — more than the cars, which are pedestrian, as drifting can be done in anything, even a bicycle — all I wanted to do in this game was drive through the flurry of sakura cherry blossoms in my little Daihatsu truck. The more advanced I got in the game, the more I had to focus on the car, and the less I could pay attention to how actually beautiful the graphics are, despite the low polygon and texture count.

    The one thing you must remember with drifting is that it is not a sport. It is frequently not even a competition. Drifting happens all the time, people, alone, on a road, just enjoying their vehicles (recently watching the foot-dragging KTM 990 Super Duke drifting has gotten my tongue lolling). Hockey, you could say, is a sport. Drifting, as my friend Gabe likes to say, is a lot more like figure skating.

    It's just there to be beautiful.

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