So Gran Turismo 4 got released and the world didn’t change. In fact, the racing genre didn’t change that much. It was just another version of good old Gran Turismo with new cars, new tracks and shinier graphics – just like some of us expected it to be. That isn’t to say that it isn’t damned good, but it certainly isn’t the racing game to end all racing games – and Konami know it. ENTHUSIA Professional Racing is their first real challenge for the driving game championship on PS2, and to be fair, from even the earliest looks, there was something that made this game catch my eye.
Ah yes, that would be the strange yellow blob sitting front and centre of the screen. This blob, is known in more technical circles as the “VGS” display. VGS stands for “Visual Gravity System” and basically is a way to show the affects of G-force on the car as you accelerate, brake and corner. The VGS bounces all over the place when you take a corner too quickly or the car begins to slide out of control, and the handy tyre indicators show you how much pressure is being applied on each tyre as you drive. In addition, the outsides of the screen are bordered by an ever so much slightly darker border – and this reflects your peripheral vision and makes visibility a little more difficult when you’re sliding around a bend at too high a rate of knots. Very clever indeed. Unfortunately, the VGS system is essentially useless in providing anything other than an annoyance to the player.
Take a second to think about this scenario. You’re hurtling towards a double apex at a hundred and fifty miles an hour, you’ve locked the brakes as you’ve misjudged the sharpness of the bend. You imagine that you can feel what is happening to the car, simply because the game is showing you a picture of a wall coming towards you incredibly fast. But you’re not supposed to be looking at that – oh, no. You’re supposed to be watching a little yellow dot and a picture of four tyres telling you that the car is braking too hard.
Thankfully, you can turn off the VGS display completely and never see it again. Manabu Akita’s system is a clever one, certainly, but did the developers really need to find the most annoying place on the race screen for it to live in’ I don’t think so. Rant over.
The rest of ENTHUSIA Professional Racing is surprisingly solid. Two hundred cars or thereabouts are available to be raced against, unlocked and then raced by you. Fifty tracks are on offer, of which only two are the mundane and annoying real-life tracks that other games peddle. This means that the developers had creative licence over the other forty-eight, and that adds surprisingly more than you’d expect to the overall experience. Rather than racing around an oval, you get to live it up in “Autumn Hill” or drive around the banks of the La Seine in France. Indeed, unlocking the new tracks is just as rewarding as completing your collection of cars, which are handed out far too easily for my liking. Even if you place last in a race, if you’ve got some “Enthu” points left, you pretty much win a car just for finishing. At race end, the “Rival Raffle” appears and you simply press a button to stop the marker as it flashes through the list of cars that competed in the race. The odds of losing are slim, since your car is greyed out, and there is only one position that the marker can stop in for you to lose. Its five to two in your favour.
Those “Enthu” points I mentioned are the real innovation. In “ENTHUSIA Life” mode, which is the main meat of the game, you begin with 300 of these points. Bumping into other cars, sliding off the track and generally driving poorly shaves points from your total. If the race ends and you have zero in the bank, you have to sit out the next week’s racing, meaning that your progress in a championship or just the battle to become the world’s number one is hindered. Choosing to drive a different car also takes an in-game week, which is just bizarre. Must be those complicated alarm systems…
Driving well will give you a skill points bonus, which can in turn raise the maximum amount of Enthu points that you can begin with. If you have more to start with, you have less of a chance of being disqualified, of course. What makes this idea so innovative is the fact that you can’t just do what you can do in Gran Turismo or any other racing game, which is bump the lead driver out of the way to take first place. If you do this, you lose points and could be disqualified for the next race, which means you still won’t earn maximum points over the two weeks, even if you did win in the first. There is a hitch, though, and that rears its head when you actually are genuinely and fairly in the lead. You’re not supposed to hit other cars, so the game takes Enthu points away when the AI drivers are doing what they always do, which is stick to their line and ram your bumper.
Graphically, the tracks in ENTHUSIA are incredibly pretty at times, with the car models being what you’d expect from a current generation racing game. There are no licensed music tracks hammering away in the background either, with the preference being for a kind of classical J-Pop, with a little drum ‘n bass thrown in for good measure. It works well, I have to say.
All in all, I’d say that ENTHUSIA Professional Racing falls somewhere in between the apparent greatness of Gran Turismo 4 and the underdeveloped Sega GT 2002 for the Xbox. Like Sega GT 2002, ENTHUSIA is a game that will doubtlessly and criminally be overlooked simply because the name of the other title is more recognisable. Maybe, folks, its time to switch brands and see if you like the way this one plays a little better. I did, despite some massively obvious flaws and the fairly strange title.
