Obscure games and why I love them Part 1 - Tokyo Extreme Racer

Happy New Year's Eve everyone! In the past week one of my postings allowed me to reconnect with my best college roommate of all time, from way back in 2000-2001. He mentioned to me a game that I haven't thought of in years: Tokyo Extreme Racer Zero. This game was actually TXR 2 (in Japan) and #3 was released here in the US as well. Both of these games owned my soul in the early part of the 2000's. And while these games received very solid critic reviews, very few people have actually heard of them, and fewer still have ever taken the time to play them. So as the first decade of the 21st century starts to close I want to take you on an extreme trip down memory lane.

The TXR series is predicated on street racing. As a kid from LA street racing was everywhere once the Fast and the Furious movies hit theaters. This game is set on the highways of Tokyo, with different segments of the city being unlocked, and each section has crews of "rivals", or enemies you must race and defeat. Now this is where TXR takes an interesting approach to racing. Every race is a one on one battle and each driver gets a health bar, just like a fighting game. Your bar decreases when you are trailing during the race. The farther you are, the faster it decreases. If you hit objects (walls, opponent, other cars, etc) you lose chunks of health. The bigger the collision, the more health you lose. You win when your opponent runs out of health. As with most racing games you win money for winning races (a lot like real street racing, if you're so bold as to bet on yourself). Money can be used to upgrade your current ride, or buy a new one all together. Each car is customizable, and TXR3 the body upgrades also increase performance, unlike TXR Zero.

All this adds up to a racing game that is a street racing/RPG/fighting hybrid. It sounds really confusing at first, but it's a very easy concept to grasp, and it's really quite addictive. I found this game during my Initial D days. For those who don't know, click here to learn more the arcade classic that was Initial D. I've always been a car nut and as my old roommate can attest, I spent hours and hours customizing my new cars, or beating rival after rival in an attempt to become racing king of Tokyo. One of my favorite parts of this game was just how detailed the customization could become. I would spend time wondering what kinds of headlight colors my car should have, matching body kit pieces, or even designing my own custom paint job in TXR3.

While I own a decent sized game library, I actually complete very few of the games that I own, simply because they become boring, I get a new game, or life forces me to focus on things other than games and I forget to pick them up again later. This was not the case with TXR. I finished both of these games, and it took quite a while. In the end, I slept easy knowing I was king of the highway. Even if most people never even knew there was a race going on...