Get Info: #2010

Review: GTi Club Supermini Festa!

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 12:00:00 +0000

The ultimate hot hatch.

Most people are familiar with the first game in the GTi Club series due to its prevalence in arcades throughout the later half of the 1990s. The second game in the series is very hard to find in the wild, whilst the third is perhaps least known but a little easier to find and play today.

The PlayStation 3 received a loose port of the first arcade game, as GTi Club+, though it takes a lot of liberties. You may not notice if you’re going from 20-something year old memories of the original arcade game, but to me it feels more Western than Japanese and the classic GTi Club handling is largely missing. It’s very much a “blue sky” reinterpretation of the original arcade game running in the Sumo Digital racing game engine. It’s OK, but that’s all.

And that brings us to the home ports of GTi Club: Supermini Festa! The third game in Konami’s arcade series added extra locations, cars, and game modes to the original recipe whilst keeping the much loved controls including the handbrake. For this home port developer Genki built on the base of the arcade game and added even more, including online multi-player, game progression, and unlockable cars, modifications, liveries. And you can still play it online today with a modded Wii!

Released amongst the aftermath of the Icelandic ash cloud and greeted with physical delays before its arrival in retail stores, and perhaps even onto digital store fronts. The game finally released in Spring 2010, a mere two years after its release in arcades. The choice of Nintendo Wii and Sony PSP is a curious one, explained in part by the Wii being a huge seller but the PSP remains an odd choice. Maybe it was easy to target both these 480p platforms with one codebase or maybe it made more sense from a Japanese perspective? Regardless, due to the capabilities of the target home platforms the HD graphics of the arcade game are downscaled in resolution and complexity to 480p and, at least on Wii, the frame rate is kept high at 60fps.

Your first few games with GTi Club: Supermini Festa! might have you feeling a little nonplussed, and that was my experience when I received it in the post in March 2010. I played it for a bit and put it to one side. It was over a decade later that I returned to play it again—with a more open mind—and it really sunk its teeth into me.

The game starts off very easy, almost too easy, as you set about unlocking cars and game modes. You might think that there is no challenge, but before long you’ll notice that difficulty begins to ramp up and you have to be a little more selective with your car choice and how you choose to level-up your car stats. By about half way through the game, and perhaps earlier if you’re going for gold medals, you’ll need to figure out that to remaining competitive means figuring out the correct car to use for each challenge and failure to do so will result in you hitting an impasse. It’s a very Japanese level of difficulty, one could describe it as the Dark Souls of driving games. I’ve seen many people hit this wall and abandon the game just as it is about to show them what it really has up its sleeve. Nintendo do the same thing in many of their games, where you play through it once and only then are the most dedicated players greeted with the main event.

One final point is about control. In the early days of playing the game I was using motion control, which is well-implemented and very enjoyable. Later in the game, I found that I needed a control method with more reaction speed. I tried Wii SNES Controller, which helped but the digital nature of the controls felt very jarring on-screen. So I switched to analog stick control on a Wii Classic Controller Pro, which gives quicker turns and reactions in general. I later spoke with 赤しおん/Aka_sion—a Japanese player with whom I race online—who confirmed that all serious Japanese players who were playing online back in the day had made the same discovery.

At this point in time GTi Club: Supermini Festa! is one of a select few hard-to-find Wii games, so it commands a high price. If you’re not a collector it’s an easier choice, as you could essentially rent the game by buying it, playing it and selling it on. Or you might have other options depending on your propensity to sail the high seas. Come on in, the water’s lovely.

Review: Split/Second Velocity

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 21:51:00 +0000

It’s common knowledge that video game movie tie-ins generally result in disappointing games. So it’s interesting to see a game that takes so much inspiration from the big screen and manages to wrap it up in a great game. And all without a movie licence in sight.

The look of Split/Second: Velocity will be instantly familiar to many. It will remind you of Jerry Bruckheimer action movies and super slick TV gameshows with it’s high gloss production values and all out assault on the senses.

A few minutes into the game you’ll probably wonder what the hell is going on. Your car is being throw all over the track, parts of the scenery exploding in astonishing fashion all around and all you get as a reward is a position near the bottom of the results when, or if, you cross the finishing line. But the game, with it’s completely over the top explosions, has drawn you in enough and you’ll keep playing. Just one more race.

A few hours later, you’ll have realised that whilst it’s a racing game at heart, there’s also a great deal of strategy involved. It’s very much a thinking man’s racer. You need to build up enough “juice” to be able to detonate parts of the scenery, which can be used to wreck fellow racers and change the balance of play and indeed in some cases the path of the course on which your driving. Your choice of cars will begin to grow, at a pace perfectly matched to the difficulty curve of the levels available.

A few days in, you’ll be progressing through the chapters, raced most of the courses and memorised where each of the powerplays are. You’ll have begun to form tactics or favourites ways to play certain sections allowing you to influence the race in many ways other than simply driving well. You’ll still be slack jawed at the variety of destruction on display and perhaps you’ll even have settled on a car that suits your driving style and allows you to go back and mop up a few of the gold medals you failed to get in the early chapters. The poker-like gamble of whether to spend time building up more juice for a large powerplay or use what you have on smaller explosions will sit in your mind long after you’ve switched off the game. Feeling in control is knowing you’ve got enough juice to make a change and knowing where you can make those changes.

A few weeks in and you’re skills will really be tested. You’ll be having some very close races whilst having to make judicious use of your powerplays. You’ll be approaching the end of the available chapters and wondering just how the explosions and set pieces can get any bigger or better. But they do. If you’re playing for achievements there are only a couple that cause any real problem - where you have to beat times set by members of the development team. The times are beatable, but it’s a task that really will separate the men from the boys - very difficult, perhaps even requiring fundamental changes to the way you’ve been driving the course involved, but always remaining fun.

Thinking about how a particular explosion and the chain of events that follow might be able to change the race is one thing, but the absolute joy that greets you when you manage to pull it off is another. Split/Second: Velocity is undoubtedly my Game of the Year 2010 and I’m looking forward to the inevitable sequel. Very nicely done indeed.

Review: GoldenEye 007

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 11:55:00 +0000

I’d love to see somebody calculate just how much time was wasted by University students playing GoldenEye: 007. Or, perhaps, how better off industry might be had we used that time to study rather than shoot each other in the face for hours on end.

GoldenEye is one of the most lauded games in history, being lavished with heaps of praise that might be considered ridiculous were the game not able to deliver on all counts. Best FPS, best multi-player game, best movie-licence - the list goes on. Being regarded as the best Nintendo 64 game ever is a commendation not many people would argue with. The game was released on the N64 which supported four players each with analog control for precise movement. The game took advantage of everything the N64 had to offer, serving up a split-screen multi-player experience with enough depth to allow for hours, days, weeks or even years of repeat play. It was a game that showed just how good Rare was at it’s peak - the story of it’s development is a fascinating insight into the whole process.

In 2008 rumours appeared online about a HD port of the original game for XBLA, but it never saw the light of day apparently due to financial disagreements between Microsoft and Nintendo. I’m not sure how that game would have been received, though. Whilst the original game still plays very well, especially in multi-player, it’s not without problems - control settings are not per player, levels are small in size, A.I. is limited and predictable, to name just a few. I feel that a port would have been looked at not through the rose-tinted glasses the original is regarded in but rather through the critical eye of today’s discerning gamer.

So, it’s no surprise why the game didn’t receive the sequel it so obviously deserved. Lots of people tried and failed to recreate the magical formula that defined the sublime experience of the original. What it was exactly that made GoldenEye so great became the stuff of legend. A few Bond games came along and were quickly forgotten about, most notable was the excellent 007 Nightfire - developed by Eurocom and released by Electronic Arts - which was a great game but failed to capture the attention of the press or public. Interesting then, that it’s the same development team that bring us the new GoldenEye: 007 for Wii, which is a remake but one that takes numerous story and gameplay cues from the much loved original and brings it bang up-to-date in terms of graphics, gameplay and production values. Fans of the original shouldn’t worry at all - the game is as worthy successor as we are ever likely to see and an essential purchase for those yearning to relive their multi-player student days. Perhaps it’s time to settle those old grudges online?

Review: ChuChu Rocket!

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 14:01:00 +0000

The Dreamcast was the first truly online home video game console, and brought with it the first wave of fantastic online multi-player games that could be played on your TV. ChuChu Rocket! was one of the best, an outstanding action puzzler with a glorious multi-player mode.

The aim of the game is to guide mice (“ChuChus”) around the screen into one or more goals (Rockets) whilst avoiding any cats (“KapuKapus”) that are roaming about. Both the mice and cats move in predictable ways - they always turn right when reaching a wall, they follow corners and they turn around when they encounter a dead end. The player places up to three arrows on the play field, which will direct anything that passes over them - both mice and cats. Arrows cannot be laid on top of other arrow or obstacles, and disappear over time and the oldest is removed if the player lays a fourth arrow. Special mice frequently appear, golden mice being worth many times more than regular mice and pink mice randomly changing gameplay in one of a number of ways. Such a simple premise quickly results in a maddening procession of mice and cats and all manner of confusion as players try to outwit each the positioning of arrows.

Single player mode saw you play against the computer or in puzzle mode where you have to figure out the solution to puzzles by placing your arrows in the correct locations to get the mice to the exit, which was an excellent part of the game in itself. Local multi-player is an absolute riot and has to be seen to be believed - there simply aren’t many other games that are this much fun played with a few friends. Online multi-player was a great backup option to have as you’d never be short of people to play against. It’s something we’re used to these days with things like Xbox Live and as we have all grown up and got on with our own lives it’s often the preferred way to experience multi-player gaming.

With the demise of the Dreamcast the game slowly faded away, briefly reentering the public eye a year later with a release on the Game Boy Advance. This handheld version matched the Dreamcast original feature for feature, with the exception of online play. However it did have slightly simplified graphics and an extra 2,5000 user-generated puzzles taken from the Dreamcast version’s online hub. There was a fan remake for the Atari ST which was an accurate but unofficial version of the game.

Recently a version of the game was released on the App Store, but with features being spread across an iPhone version and an iPad version and it not feat as much content as the older GameBoy Advance version. It’s great to see such an original game get a new lease of life, but sad that it’s still missing important features from the original, showing just how far ahead of it’s time the Dreamcast was. Hopefully the iOS versions of the game will gain multi-player support in the future and finally give us the experience that was so enthralling those 10 years ago.

This review is dedicated to my good friend Morgan, without whom I’d have never bought a Dreamcast. He will always be Mr Sega to me.

Get Info: #2010

Review: GTi Club Supermini Festa!

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Review: Split/Second Velocity

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Review: GoldenEye 007

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Review: ChuChu Rocket!

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